Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

At mile marker six, I spot a raft hung up, abandoned. Its gray ends flapping against the current like a sweating dog's tongue. The wind is my only external companion as I try to remember how to use all the 24 gears at my disposal. Other cars, most loaded with rafts overtake me or meet me on the road, but the SUV with the two kids waving at me out their back window-- a mixture of awe and revery strikes me as entirely fitting. There's so many adjectives that I could use, and I could load a sentence down with metaphors yet only create something that while new, neither adequately describes this area or soars enough off the page to make these words more than merely evocative or imitative. Words, despite the pretense and lie of insisting they were the beginning are just our way of understanding, piercing our perception of reality and making it make sense. If our awakening consciousness was the "word," then the sentence, the poem-- was &q