A Vessel Named Robert
A Ride On A Vessel
I parked my chariot and walked to the ramp. I wanted to take this vessel all the way one way and then all the back, right back to where I started. I wanted to ride this circle. I had no idea how long this journey would take. Tonight, this night, details like that, well, they just didn’t matter. So this is exactly what I did. It was already late, already dark when I arrived. Everyone else, almost everyone else, was in a vehicle. I was almost the only one on foot.
It was night and the sky above was now all black.
Tonight on this way out, there were five others also on foot. A woman with her new child and no father in sight. Another woman with her new child and no father in sight, either. And a lone man, a typical good natured Texas young man. I talked to these women, I asked for their permission to record what they look liked to me this night. They said, “Yes.” I talked to this lone man, too. He was here as well because he had no where else better to be in this, his state of Texas, after a long journey away. He had been farther north than I had on mine. A farther true north where it was his task to rebuild that line through a place. Now he was here, on this vessel, looking for some new thing, just like me.
As he and I parted ways, I saw he had a symbol of death scribed forever where his spine connects to his brain and where he himself cannot directly see it, even if he were to try. So I asked him, “Can I record it?” He said, “Yes.” I pointed my machine right at it and my machine burst its fake lightning all over it. Because of this false lightning, I can, I will, see it forever even when I look directly at it. Maybe this idea of death he cannot see or want to see, when he looks for it, like a woman I once saw couldn’t see the lightning when she tried.
I made my way to a private place on the outside of this vessel where no one could see me. I wanted to be alone and I put my forever machine away. I stepped up really close to the steel of this vessel. I rested my face against the steel of this vessel. I put my face inside a crack of this steel vessel. I stuck my tongue out, into this crack of this steel vessel. This steel vessel did not taste like what my memory can.
This Was The One Time I Had Actually Been On This Vessel, But I Had Been Taken Aboard Before
