Ribbons of meet on the static-yet-mobile palace of traction. Your religion is auto, or stick-shift; it's speed and it's trap and it's an exploration of the already explored.
Combat Expiration: 12am PST, 5/9/2011
Critique Expiration: 12am PST, 5/11/2011, with a rolling grace period of 24 hours to allow for critique rebuttals.
Bonuses/Penalties: +2 if posted by 6pm PST, 5/6/2011, +1 if posted by 2am PST 5/7/2011, -1 if posted by 6am PST 5/9/2011, -2 if posted by 12pm PST 5/9/2011.
The Rules: http://combatwords.blogspot.com/2010/07/official-rules-for-combatwords-updated.html
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The Sign
ReplyDeleteI drove to Eagle Rock late one night
And bought a Leslie speaker at a music store
Loaded it into my dad's station wagon
Got on the freeway to head home
A few miles down the road I pulled over
To stare up at the huge empty sign
The white letters hadn't been painted on yet
It was just a big blank green freeway sign
"This must be the road to nowhere," I said
A cool night breeze blew leaves and tumbleweeds
I remember it whenever I hear
The sound of a Hammond through a Leslie
And whenever I hear about something in Eagle Rock
And sometimes when I'm just driving
And looking up at the signs
That usually tell you where you're going
Usually ... but not always
If I could strip self-loathing
ReplyDeletethe way I shed clothing,
bear pointless failures of life
as mothers bare saggy tits with pride
I might get to wear a smile
every once in a while.
I-95 to Avalon, FL
ReplyDeleteThe armadillos tried their best to stop you
but you sent them bouncing like bocce balls into the kudzu.
The scrub pines lopped off their own limbs
and hurled them into your path, but your snow tires
snapped through them like wooden matchsticks.
The garrison of crows stationed on the twin yellow lines
turns out to be cowardly, evaporating at the roar of your engine.
A short order ex-con in a truck stop
tried to poison you with an okra omelet
but you just vomited a while in the parking lot
and continued on your quest. Due south.
The fangs of orange cones were hardly menacing,
nor the miles squeezed to a single lane for resurfacing.
Countless multitudes of insects martyred themselves
against your windshield, perhaps in the hope
that their accumulated goop would glaze the glass into opacity.
They didn't count on the Stuckey's, with its bucket
of gray crudwater, in which was sheathed
the rubber blade Excalibur, that mighty squeegee.
No, nothing could keep you from completing your quest,
from rescuing your damsel in distress
(whose ample gums and girth were not apparent
in the pictures that she'd posted on the internet)
from the room where she was being held against her will
in a trailer park in a suburb of Gainesville.
Knight errant, you kept spurring on your metal steed.
You gritted your teeth
on account of all the caffeine pills you'd popped.
Nothing -not shed dragonscales
nor flipped hubcaps, nor state cops
could ever cause you to ease up.
Vikings Sailing I-280
ReplyDeleteI saw an apocalypse cloud—it was sorrow;
A longboat of blackness above the Pacific.
I rowed my own passage aboard a Mercedes;
My boss was the skipper, I worked in the galley.
The sunrise reflected upon the cool ocean
Of morning, we drove to hotels where the coffee
Is swill, where the pastries are waxen, the people
Are plaster and brittle and worship the dollar.
I worship the dollar, the suits by Armani;
The flow of a people in search of a nexus
Of love, of a meaning beyond the cold freeway
Bisecting the conference, slicing the parking,
Lots and the longboats at war with the earth:
Burning, but not yet consumed and digging,
Yet not quite interred and damning, but not yet doomed.