(This poem began as a free verse poem years ago and kept growing into a prose poem. Published in the January, 2023 edition of the prose poem journal, Unbroken ).
Joy Ride
Listen: it’s like this: sometimes after you steal it you
have to floor it. See it’s not a getaway or a chase. It’s more like you’re
running late and the deadline is sunset. And it’s not like you’ve stellar
judgement in these crimes of passion. Safety was never the deal. But this time
the wheels won’t steer you anymore. You’ve hit a patch of mortal ice. The heart
softens what once was steel and they’ve mistaken kindness for weakness. Then
dark angels steal your tears, then scatter them like salt on the road and in
the wound you wear down. You lose your grip on what you thought was real. Feel
my fists, they are fallen angels too. They have frosty wings. They all flew
much too high but did not melt and fall, historically, into your warming sea.
Look. It’s night, and the top is down. A single moon dries out in highway winds
outside Indio. Lunacy put the fear of some god, let’s say, into my deserted
limbs. They flew off the random wheel, shaking at the stars that let them down.
They flail like a drowning man climbing the ladder in a lake of fire. You put
me through hell, angel eyes. So I beat the hell out of you, my brother. “Devil
or angel”, when I punch the radio’s preset. Set for seventy years in this
“borrowed” rattletrap. A fistful’s hit parades nestle your grief on my lap.
Jack-knifing in the blind motion, I wrestle with silence, again, for control.
An empty bottle breaks body and soul. Buddy, let’s stay fugitives. I tell ya,
going back’s a trap. After midnight I wake up. One headlight is out but the
tank is half full. Even after the swerve and the crash you still sleep in the
passenger’s seat. The metal bends round you like a halo. Your cheeks are dark
by a day of not shaving. My desires pause in the hair and hollows of your face.
The laws we smashed desert us too. The silver light from the dash makes the
bruises on your arm the color of the mountains ahead, the senseless gash now
dry as the moon. The laws lose their nerve. I think, “We can make the border by
sunup.” You know, that dawn seen only by the ocular heart passing on a blind
curve.