Notes from a Tuesday Traffic Jam
by Mark Neely
I am lost in thin beer, playgrounds of rusting UFOs, gigantic french fry billboards, lost in the mall, the wild gyrations of the clock, lost like a stroller outside 7-11, lost for good in walls of televisions, in slaughtered animals spitting on the grill, in the drugstore’s red cursive, the static surf of my computer, lost in bourbon fumes and smog belched from the assholes of Toyotas, in scrolls of city names on airport monitors, in the blips and squiggles of hospital machinery, lost in Sanskrit written on cloud edges;
deep in the slows and downrushes of my mind, in forests northern and tropical, topical and forgotten, in the slender past, where dogs and sofas and crushes and jeans and parents and bones and nations are all young;
banned from the thoughts of old lovers who smuggle through cities their pills for headaches, brainfevers, liveraches, heartaches, birth control, better orgasms, stomach trouble, sleeplessness and panic attacks, who carry neon cell phones, pagers, stethoscopes, bible verses, nail clippers, pepper spray, scrawled phone numbers, airline vodka and Virginia Woolf, recipes for Mai Tais and chicken korma and fancified mashed potatoes, photographs of dogs, lovers, husbands, girlfriends, fathers and mothers, of men in hats and foreign-looking women, of cats, roller coasters, antique toasters, sailboats, cruise ships, Sarasota beaches and African airports, but not one photo, even crumpled and by accident, of me;
abandoned by the dead who gamble every night, who eat what they want, who burn their trash for extra light, who write hundred act plays then dump them for a game of tennis, who pump the scent of perfume, corn bread, pipe smoke, azaleas, old clothes, salt air, moth balls, trampled violets, factory wind, deodorant, gunpowder, and my own dying skin into the air;
left behind by Paris Hilton and Sherman tanks, Volkswagens and Kremlin and Martyr’s Mosque, by the hormone-pumped thighs of Sammy Sosa and Tyson chicken, by the sharp edge on my neighbor’s lawn, by the blather of cell phones zinging the air, the TV talk, the breasts and plastic and dismembered corpses and Hollywood limos and flattened earthquake villages and shiny dogs and bleeding diamonds all zinging the air like fairies, by the President’s coded messages zinging around the world, believers zinging him back with puckish missiles, all of them zinging away my beloved ghosts who move through air awkward and slow and are no match;
rotting like a banana in a high school locker, like a minefield in a mountain pass, like open wine, like ideology, like the bones of an extinct woodpecker, like a deer lost in a field of thistles, like old tires, like the stooped woman there with her little dog, her rotting little dog;
sung by the last stray cat in her heat, by an old soprano to an empty room, by wintering crickets, by soaked maple leaves, by kids fleeing the school bus into the dying sun, sung by the murmuring drunk in the back row of the movie theater, by the band at a high school prom, sung softly by the last tired wedding guest, his tie drooping from his hand;
and I am hidden in the face of the moon.
