The Drowning Of St Christopher

There's no heart in the men who run these mountain bars

All love extinguished by location and cold fronts

Dogs in the parking lot surround the car for scraps of affection

For eyes not glazed over like black ice

Thousands of kilometres of roughage and terracotta roofs

Horizons replaced by horizons

We run the belly of rainclouds between madrid and valencia

With the radio tuned into the weather we don't have

St christopher drowns crossing the river

Firs blown onto the windscreen disperse like a pack of tiny black birds

Service stations are watched over from the hills by shepherds

Who spend all their days flooded by thought

A deafening meditation

The cowbells, like bloody church alarms

Smashing the silence of grass, of the air

I am interviewed in a sleepy bar by a girl who wants me to explain

"The warmth of nostalgia," incensed that i "glamourise sadness"

And after seven hours on the road

I have lost all defences - they are roadkill, torn up, gutted

At night, tiny red beacons crown lonely antennas

Everywhere is shepherded in the absence of gods

Cities spoil everything

That there is somewhere to go and something to do

When the partition between sleep

And awake in the back of the van features such happy accidents

Hazed dreams in an unfocused super 8mm

On rainy nights, we are docked in the harbour of circular ballrooms

Playing to the shadows, playing to revolving mirrorballs

Our harbours are in brandy glasses

Our music is swilled

In hostels, fourth floor, bare rooms but for a bed and a sink

We stare vacant at sleeping guitars

Wndering how many fucks and violence

And drugs have intervalled us staring at sleeping guitars

And the taps can't be turned off

And there's suspect movement on the stairwell

Small pictures of boats in storms

Watches and money in our shoes

We wake up and the building is still there

And we're still in it, like miserable captains