Finding Myself


Hitchhiking from Scotland when I was nineteen.
Bare yellow hills.  Pale blue sky.  I was trying to have an adventure 
but all I did was wait.  Once an old woman and her pug— 
once a refrigerator salesman, all the way to Carlisle.
But then another scrubby interchange.  The wind bending the grasses.  

That night I finally knocked on the door 
of a lorry parked on the side of the motorway, and the driver let me sleep 
in back, shivering in the faux leather jacket I bought in Spokane 
with some of the money I made working at Safeway all summer, 
stocking shelves and imagining myself in England.  

In the morning, squeezed between the driver and his mate 
on the way to Stoke-on-Trent, I had to piss so bad my eyes began 
to water.  Long gray factories.  Warehouse after warehouse.  
We spend all our lives trying to find ourselves.  And we always do.


-first published in Poetry Northwest