journal everyday

The process is cyclicar and infinite.

Never enough time.

This will be my Homecoming, the first one since 2003 when I came back from Iraq.

I don’t think I even went back then. I think my mind was still in Iraq.

I will walk all the way from Augusta, Richmond County, Georgia, to Athens, then to Asheville, North Carolina; then to the Cherokee communities south of Maggie Valley, then to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee; then to Red River Gorge, Kentucky, then to my ancestral home in Elizabethton, Hardin County, then to the ferry that crosses the Ohio River, then to Springfield, then to Galesburg, once home of Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters.

I will take one small tent, one blanket, one spare pair of boots, extra socks, underwear, one change of jeans, one pair of sweats, a hat, some drinking water in a camelback, some fire, and a good knife, and a book.

I will try to raise some consciousness about world peace, individal activism, and the choices each and every one of us have to face today.

Here I am.

Here I am on a Thanksgiving Night,
all alone,
no, not all alone, but yes, alone—

Family now asleep,
Radio on, horns beeping
a Colchester something or other,
on Public Radio, blaring
tooting bah baa-ing,
while the traffic, the yellow-light lamps
of the street illuminating cop cars white
go wending silently north along the highway.

There go I in search of cold beer,
cold comfort for a lonely soul,
human ghoul, untold nothings not revealing.