[untitled]

 

Thick with sleep in our night-coded

plots of land, we dream of the easy back roads

gotten clean across in our hey days.

 

Nobody dozes out there now, those tracks

are sealed. Convoys of trucks, our blighting enemy,

burn blunt soft noses with diesel napalm.

 

It is said, we’re on the way out. Dead

by tomorrow, that God’s great leaps forward

have never included nudgers and fumblers.

 

Yet still I pledge my snout to snort up the enemy.

To test the stink of tires for close relations

snuffed out in the morning’s cruel fuel- fires.

 

 

We usually say: Best not go there. Then

we say those bells and lights never strike twice.

But that hellish highway is a graveyard of proverbs

 

And we have rites of respect to cross ourselves with,

to bring us out, one after one, to scent our road kill.

Our noises you hear from the edge of the Universe.

 

See, those whisperings are ours, those stars

Were for us, let us say, long before your inventions,

And though that hellish highway is a proverbial graveyard

 

He’s chatting with us.  We’re aware we’re

taken in, in the end, by that old earth-shaking

grumbler who put us here, and you there.