Brushes With The Dark Law

(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.