And the Party Never Ends by James H Duncan

if you leave San Antonio around 4 a.m.

you might make that Mad-Max run up to

Austin with almost no traffic, maybe a semi

or two, but that’s it, and I eased from one 

lane to the next in a state of anxious luxury,

looking forward to and worried about another

trek up through Waco, Dallas, Little Rock, 

Memphis, Nashville, the Smokies, then the

choice of Virginia flatlands or West Virginia 

switchbacks, and it doesn’t matter which 

because by then you’re a zombie to the road, 

the fever dreams, the white pills that keep you 

running headlong, the picnic tables at rest stops 

that become your funeral slabs for 30 minute naps

in the open air, then back to the highway dreams

but that morning, close to 4:30 a.m. just

outside of San Antonio, I had the road alone,

the radio tuned to some no-name station

that started to play Robert Earl Keen, 

“The Road That Never Ends,” and as it 

flowed through speakers in the far edge of

night I felt the wheels of the car begin to lift

right off the blacktop, the tale of Sonny and

and Sherry, Main Street after midnight, a beer

between her legs as she’s off to meet some 

friends, how the party never ends…

as the horizon became a cobalt blue zipper

ready to peel open another bright sky highway

that song carried me past the anxieties that had

built and strangled and followed me all the way

from my father’s front steps, carried me beyond

my fears of making another mistake, leaving one 

home behind to re-start my life back at my other, 

both ways home feeling more like emergency 

parachutes than anything, but ol’ Robert Earl Keene 

kept singing and I kept driving, and you know what?

he’s right, the road goes on forever, even when you 

wish it wouldn’t, even after you take that last exit, 

be it another big mistake or the best decision you

ever made, when you’re nothing but highway dust,

that party will still be out there beyond the horizon 

at 5:05 a.m., threatening another bright blue day 

without your bones walking around to greet it

there’s a little comfort in that, I think,

but only if you turn the radio up and

keep moving forward with all the speed

and hope and wild grace you can muster

James H Duncan is the editor of Hobo Camp Review and the author of We Are All Terminal But This Exit Is Mine, Feral Kingdom, and Vacancy, among other books of poetry and fiction. He currently resides in upstate New York where he works on novels and reviews indie bookshops at his blog, The Bookshop Hunter. For more, visit www.jameshduncan.com.