I. Inertia
My stomach shifts as my girlfriend sweats,
whispers about locked lips with a cross
dresser she met in Savannah. I-75 North
propels us towards the mountains. Dragon
flies spread across the windshield, puss spectral
like glare around Atlanta, or like the dew dripping
from wilting lilacs. She continues. I breathe,
a being in motion with a 1967 Colt .45 hiding
in the glove box. The safety broken as we hit
seventy barreling towards North Carolina. Words
push forward, like a lily rising through kudzu.
A brake squeal. The car stops. I reach for the dash.
II. Friction
Motion erotic, abstract glaring of headlights
through weeds. She may say his lips
taste like cinnabar. She may say his hips
drip like the ice of Mars. I taste bile
pull my hand away. Her words, machine
washable as each could easily turn
into questions. The bullets lie dormant as
she mouths forgive me. Hazard lights strobe
in an abyss the dragon eyes of eighteen
wheelers glare as I taste the burn
rubbing between the there and not-there.
Here are a few fragments:
blood on a blue dress, a cracked windshield,
father smiling, a red curtain hanging against
a white wall. Perhaps a young man
in blue jeans and an Atlanta Braves cap. Here
grass grew taller, yes, definitely, the grass
looms around the knees.
We drove east until the
tires of our truck drifted
on the tide. The highway
passed like a worm inching
in silt.
Here time ticks much slower
now that the grass eats
the sky, twisting its blades
around glass shards and a few
carefully arranged drops of
blood. The grass remembers
the snap, and the shattering,
but can’t recall any particulars.
We drove east until
sand glassed underneath
burning wheels. The Highway
markers fade like the flicker
of memory.
Here Jeans armor
against concrete. My
memory can die on the
roadside with the twist
of a wrist. I can say
speed a lover
of curb and median,
that father’s smile
could quickly, yes,
oh so quickly, turn to
shattered teeth and
broken gums.
An LP swirls like a galaxy caught in lilted hum
The vinyl spins Talking Heads over the
shag carpet. This ain’t no disco rings from my
father’s speakers. Lonely, how these things work:
my father’s mohawk scalped by time, his
denim moth eaten, his LPs sun-faded,
father’s memory turned to a motive behind
burning old photographs. The Polaroid burns
into absence, yet guitars warble in my ears
Memories Can’t Wait croons David Byrne,
but he lacks the DNA of desire that lingers
in the genes of a comet. A montage of voices
peering through the ice of Jupiter and into
the memory of a boy playing with the music of
another age.
The notes repeat like bursting starsi endure for
millennia after fires die. The vocals cool
super-heated memories: the music of empty
calloused hands that never picked me
up to watch the Sex Pistols play CBGB’s,
Good-bye to Jimmy Carter, to punk’s
half-dead battle cries, good-bye dad. I take
the record, crack the edges in my palm.
The past’s nebulous gases linger
in each melody, no matter the discord.
Derick sincerely believes that everyone needs to dance around their house naked at least once a week; in addition to that, being declared an ethicist has made him a general misanthrope. Most good ethicists are. He loves tomatoes and thinks that loving such fruit is profound. He does not like to speak in third-person because he understands that it is a sign of true insanity, but so is literature. He has vowed no longer to be witty in biographies that are included in literary journals of any medium.