For reccea: "Chris as a Jack Kerouac type writer. Justin as a young poet he meets along the way."

He's twenty-nine and he has no job and he can feel it under his skin, itching, itching, shifting and pulling and threatening to crack him open and devour him like a vulture on a carcass, the need to write, to create, to throw his words out onto the water and wait for them to come back to him, shifted and shaped and turned back and forth and around until they're something new that he's never felt before. He can feel it under his skin, and he sits in cafes and diners and on the sides of roads and at bus stops and garages and general stores, cigarette in one hand, pen in the other, notebook in front of him and waiting for him to pour his ink and blood across the virgin page. He sits in cafes and diners and lets it go, spills his ink and blood across the page and leaves behind tiny footprints of where he's been, every mark a line on his face, every line an epitaph for who he's been and never will be again.

He's got everything he owns in a duffel bag slung across his shoulder or sitting at his feet, and he carries it with him like a turtle carries its shell, and he never comes back to the same place twice. He lives from moment to moment, city to city, picking up and moving when one place loses the wonder of discovery. His poetry picks up America along the way, each stanza giving face and voice and life to the waitress who refills his coffee, the mechanic who buys him dinner in exchange for a day's work on an engine or a chassis. His verse carries the exhausted rise and fall of the voice of the mother of two who sits next to him waiting for the bus in Cleveland, the quiet despair of the man five days out of jail whose family has left no forwarding address, the radiant hope of the girl in the library who shows off her new diamond ring and says that they're going to live in Seattle and raise five children. He loves them all, moment to moment, those tiny gifts of people he never met before and will never see again, and he writes them into sestina and villanelle, sonnet and blank verse, free verse and haiku, short story and essay.

He's twenty-nine and he has no job and he can feel it under his skin, like the way he can feel his lover's hands on his skin. He's got everything he owns in a duffel bag slung across his shoulder or sitting at his feet, and the most precious thing he carries with him isn't a thing at all, but the smile he gets every morning when they rise to meet another day. He loves them all, moment to moment, but the reason he can love at all is tall and lanky, all arms and elbows, with an easy lope and a constant smile and a voice like sunrise and a heartbeat that whispers mine, ours, us.

Every line is an epitaph for who he's been and never will be again, and the reason he can write at all travels at his side, and he knows that no matter how many lovers he has who will forever be strangers to him, eyes met at a glance, histories and hopes and fears and dreams all caught in those bare few lines, he will never be able to write Justin at all.

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