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Highway 95

I am rolling in a glossy dead machine,
the lemon-groves are shimmering
on the chrome sides of the world,
a friend is laughing his gentle years
away in the murdered-animal leather of the passenger seat,
and nobody else knows the shape of the sky 
from this hollow, speeding place.

Convenience stores open with painted eyes
the broken, universal face at 3 am
joins beauty's eyes between fragrant leaves somewhere in Africa
and a whole population threatens
to burst into loud tears simultaneously
as the invisible thunder shoves the clouds aside
above the lingering neon arms
and all the false colors that will never enter eternity.

And the laughter puts a sheen of ice over the sadness,
steams the windshield beneath flocks of angelic birds,
squawks that suck in forked pieces of the air and
make the shelves of wind above earth ring with
primal urgency again, dripping down their sounds 
through the windshield and tapping away 
the radio's blare like a cigarette ash diminishing.

A warm rain comes down constantly to be inside this body.
It is indescribably strange to be human,
a clumsy image of the whole universe's expanding glory
too often forced to cease expanding in yourself,
compacted into a colorful bundle of tormented nerves,
a body breaking softly into other bodies once in a while,
a little sneeze against the alarm clock and a muffled laugh in
the fading fragrance of someone's hair.

In thousands of wildly-flickering hotel mirrors
where the sudden water drips like a silent waterfall
and cleans away the fast-food scents
to be replaced by other artificialities,
I am creepily alive in too many 
slightly different simultaneous faces.
I am constantly startled, terrified in gladness to be alive.
I want to thank something that doesn't make too many rules.
Each of my eyes in the rented mirrors are deer bounding over
hills to get away from themselves.
But that's not the way that the animals run.

It is indescribably strange to be the one 
behind this groaning wheel,
the power-steering fluid running out into the ditches of death
in North Carolina at 5 am where the police-lights blow 
their light, epileptic blue fire over the seething orange groves 
in a glorious nightmare of warring color,
atmospheres that should be impossible 
in each other's presence invading each other,
old graves worn down like teeth
covered in aluminum cans and gasoline puddles
with searing reflections of cirrus clouds,
skies strewn across wreckage
in bittersweet stinks of summer,
road-signs and billboards becoming mirrors in mirage.

CALL 1-900-YOUNG-GIRLS-SEX-YOU-UP
GOD WANTS TO HAVE A TALK WITH YOU
STOP IN FOR ICE-CREAM AND GASOLINE
NO OBLIGATION
NO OBLIGATION
NO OBLIGATION
IT'S NEVER TOO LATE TO START THINKING ABOUT LIFE INSURANCE

To see the hands age on the wheel, 
to see the turmoil of the sky that never finds them,
the flesh conscious of the spirit wounded so often
in an anonymous blaze of traffic, 
toll-booths where the money-changer's eyes
wrinkle up like newspaper in a slow fire,
information of mute children,
untouched joys and horrifying unkindnesses 
lingering there in the pupils,
shrinking black pinholes between 
the wounded human colors
as the headlights make them dilate 
with their aggressive, roving miniature suns 
that in leaving subtract years from an old face,  
and move on as then the neon shadows replace them.  

The harsh and distant jingling of coins 
sometimes goes too deep into the earth.
We need to leave the metal world 
for a moment and breath the breeze that ripples outward
from the seaweed coiling on the ocean's surface 
and the curling of the growing bark of trees.
Think through the bus window
of the earth as a seething ball glowing on all sides,
inadequate but grand representation of your own energy.
Your eyes will ravage their circuits widening 
to pick all that flooding electricity up.

As the windows of a bus move through the fog of cities
I see myself throwing off my alien clothes 
into the sewer steam, jewelry tumbling through steaming grates
into deep nothingness and bare feet
jumping guardrails filled with broken glass,
bleeding through the long bowing grasses and between the lemons,
tight explosions of yellow in the painful freedom of the air,
endless oxygen where nobody talks about politics.

Tire-marks paint gleeful violence
on the road where people making
reckless love in the driver's seat
while her gasping buttocks honked the horn
and both of them giggled inside each other
zig-zagged across the shimmering tar 
and swerved into calmer years.

Guiding us over the wide road,
those skids that lost the strict patterns of the road
make me wonder how the street-painters kept their patience
as they sexlessly stretched their temporal
double yellow lines across this tar,
the toxic smell mixing with the odor
of freshly-bruised forests and rising above the earth,
and occasionally the alienated head
peeking out from among his fellow workers,
confused eyes wondering how much
the trek across this tar section of the earth is worth.

In another solar system, a sun explodes
and implodes, making a rude punctuation-mark
in the battered paperback that is the universe,
old paper put though the printing press
and coming out improbably intact over and over again,
as shimmering, motley balls of soil and rock,
planets without names or maps, collide with each other like piņatas.
Somebody enters another somebody
on a cool white air-conditioned plane of hotel sheets
and swears against his teeth
as our not-quite universal traffic
slides by alongside their breathing
"I have driven all these miles to be inside your body,
 if I ever see that road again I'll run
 in a 3-piece suit torn to pieces
 to get away from its hollow scent, 
 and back into the fullness of yours."

Outside, the years that made the street
hum past the years that build up inside the drivers,
and the current wears their faces like sandstone
away with sinister gentleness.
People drift solemnly over parking lots
with suitcases of quieted animal flesh
and each face is a seashell worn down
and washed up on an endless shore,
all flesh is sand with streetlights glimmering in the background
just before the curve of earth precedes the strain of the galaxy
waiting, like you, to burst out of itself
before the sun bashes the flocks of chrome beetles
into kaleidoscopic, insane metallic beauty 
to reflect every dead and breathing star.

Our lives have been a broken promise nestled in auto-insurance,
the noise of traffic is all of humanity sobbing into a pillow,
but on a flimsy balcony above a high shelf of neon,
a girl in a nightdress thinner than cobweb
smiles in a way that puts flesh on all the angels.
You know what I'm talking about.
She's been told, just like the rest of us 
to prepare for the end of the world
but if you look at her the way the eyes in the air look at her
every tender angle in her face
says to prepare for the beginning.

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