Picture old world gods crammed with their whole life’s
possessions in a shabby Subaru
--three of them--the number of divinity.
They pass around a half eaten bag of
potato chips, like fate’s thread, the driver,
the navigator and one slumped against
a passenger side window, not sleeping,
Just resting her eyes. They are lovers, or
friends, or sisters, or all three. It matters
very little here in this parthenon.
What matters is the love, the closest the
gods would ever need to come to worship.
The moon slants through the driver's side window
and casts a blue shadow across the car.
The road is two parallel lines, meeting
at the infinity of the horizon
and every single rest stop they pass serves
as their own personal Mount Olympus.
There are neon lights flashing like lightning
and semi-trucks rolling like thunder. Each
new place filled with silver plated idols,
proclaiming the pilgrim’s forever
devotion to this place and this place only.
Before the girls leave the asylum of
the Subaru, one of them reapplies
her lipstick in the rear-view mirror, lines like
prayers she has said so many times she has
stopped hearing the words and only knows the
most primal sounds in the prayer. The most primal
Shapes in the tube of lipstick. The car is
filled with carboard french fry holders and used
up coffee cups, it is the place where rest stop
food goes to die, the cupholders in a
permanent state of purgatory,
the bottles of naked juice mourned by their
last drops solidifying into green
and orange mush along the bare edges
of clear bottle. And still spurred ever onward
by flaming gasoline and buzzing caffeine,
the chariot that is the subaru
flies at the horizon. It’s brights beating
the darkness back. Driven by old world gods.
--done in pentameter-ish
No comments:
Post a Comment