Fuel is the blood of the travelling soul,

drawn from deep under paddocks and fault lines,

bottled into stations that glow like roadside lungs at night.

We stand there watching the price climb,

and feel it in the gut before the tank even opens,

each litre a borrowed vien from the earth’s own body,

turned into movement, turned into another stretch of road.

The car drinks slow, like it knows what it costs to go

and still we go, because staying has its own price

and the road keeps its promise without ever speaking it.


Now that I have centred my rage writing the above poem: it is time to spiral a little.

These current gas prices are like cancer in the bloodstream of a traveller, a slow-spreading corruption that seeps into the very thing that keeps them moving. Because petrol is not a luxury, it is essence. It is the spirit fluid that carries them toward new skies and unfamiliar ground, that exchange between calling and distance. And now that exchange feels poisoned, each price increase is another tightening around the veins, another silent theft of possibility. Kilometres become questions instead of promises. Horizons feel further, not because they have moved, but because the cost of reaching them has. There is a mourning in this, an internal collapse of spontaneity. Where once there was open road and instinct, now there is calculation and second-guessing. The engine sits idling, like it knows it is being asked to wait when it was built to run. And the traveller feels it too, that restless pressure beneath the ribs that does not disappear just because movement has been limited. The world still stretches wide, still radiates with places that call out in ways that cannot be silenced, yet the means to answer grows thinner, more fragile, more out of reach. So journeys are shortened or abandoned entirely, left as thoughts and not experiences, as if entire versions of the self are being economically denied their becoming. And before I put this pen down, I feel the need to say that I am consciously aware that comparing something to cancer may be perceived as morally thoughtless, but here it stands only as a metaphor for something invasive, consuming, and difficult to ignore.


written by Mathew Johnson (Abmon)