Frank Reardon
The Open Road of Your Bookcase
When a man has nothing but his
name and a mouthful of words, no
money just personal hate and inner
famine, when the road opens up in
front of his old beat up shoes, the
possibilities become limitless. The
cynics and elitists vanish. Those
doubt soaked ladies become tiny
incidents. The memories decide not
to pan out and the jobs could be
anything: fisherman, lumberjack,
miner, store clerk, or the priest
of a lonely heart.
The road is experience and truth.
It's the place of one thousand ghosts.
It becomes the palace of your open
mast (the one you simplify with true
grit and courage.) When a man has
simple things like notebooks, pens,
selected music, and powerful works
from the typewriter, he can see people
stripped to the bone. He can see a
man's blood pump on the outside. He
can tell what comfort really does for
the people of the arm chair relax. Art
never had a bigger challenge than that
of true passion taken by feet that truly
need to see the earth.
To see and to meet, to plunge the
knife in deeply, to taste and to seek.
I shall gain this knowledge by rafting
across the great colony of despair and
seeing the real suffering. The real deal
all over, not to look within the same
walls of one, two, or three towns, I shall
listen to similar winds across the plains
of my own sorrows and gain the slick
confidence that most will not even
attempt to try. I'm not better or worse,
but I seek formal gain and a card
player’s smile. When I leave your
town I will open my brain and suck in
your truths, and before I leave upon this
road again, I shall leave myself upon
the shelves of your bookcase.
