Driving

!
The trees start talking
Over the radio scream
Over the anger brewing
Over the passing cries
Of a solitary Red-tailed
Hawk in spring’s open.

They talk of other cars
Besides my bread van
Millions of cars flying by
On the concrete snake
They talk of sad faces
They talk of losing the battle
They talk of a doomed
Race of overachieving ants.

I have heard the leaves
Groan and stretch to life
Not bothered by the rain
But poked and prodded
By bumble bees, squirrels,
Birds landing and pecking,
Human eyes seeing them fall
Before their fall, awaiting as
Always the death of things alive.

When the grass talks of true speed
In the opening weeks of spring, Send
Word to Grow rumbles a wave cadence
Of spring’s effervescent volcanic kinetics,
I listen like a thief to the green cells awake
In the sunlight’s gravity in a collective song
hungry for that sort of human family singing.
I drive on knowing dharma in chorus green,  
so holy now is the feeling I could bleed a cross.
Other drivers pass but don’t listen and I think
It’s sad but marvel in my keen sense for the                 unheard reverberations of heaven.

@

Now I check the weather online
Twice a day sometimes, excessive-compulsive worrier
About thunderstorms or the chance of sleet or partial sun
That could be interrupted by hail or lightning crashes that
Just might crash into you. So what to do is there but worry?

The internet is a worry machine.

I drive past the mall and see a website blinking on the sign
And I go home to my wife and cat with sore bones from
11 hrs of transit
weary and high
I look it up and
Want and want
And want and
Want and want
And start to need
And let that devil greed
Build up and then I worry about
Hell but get more stuff from the mall website
Online shopping bonanza with over 42 shops
Participating with easy payment by any major credit card
If I only push the keypad numbers with my electronic pin

and then the comedown off this shitlusthigh and
Worrying now about Bills and more debt
More road tomorrow.

The internet sells worry
For the road and beyond.


I had to get off early yesterday
To have the cable company see what                                       the hell
Happened to my cable internet service

#

I calculate miles with bread
I calculate my life with time
Spent behind the van wheel
In direct opposition to home

Days that feel impressive, long winded days
When the customer is not always right
And I drive my car slow as an 80 yr old senile.

When it is 1130am on the job
This means I have reached
An approximate middlespot
And start the long exhale of
Hope for home and bedside
Pipe with a book maybe two,
A dvd about bird migration,
Reasons to smile at unrushed
Locomotion, not timed stops,
Not my calculated life’s miles
Delivering fresh Italian bakery
Goods to landscaped memory
Of fine eating establishments

$.

I go home with hands
Smelling of passed and
Re-passed paper and
Coinage from the hands
Of bartenders and
Waitresses and owners:

One waitress always pays
Out of her green pocketed
Apron, rummaging around
Through order pad, breath
Mints, toothpicks, lipstick

To get the exact change for
The $3.90 bill for bread and
Yeast. Other payers pay by
Rounding, but she is precise.

Perhaps she was good at math
In high school and is showing
Off her skills in calculating $;

Maybe an accounting major
At the local college or just                              in love
With the feel of cash exchange—

The tip calculation and wage
Additions that equal whether
Or not she will pay the rent
This month. I stare at her too
Long and she catches me, I
Bow my head to hide in pay
Counted out meticulously into
My open hands.

There is this one owner I remember from my youth
That kicked me out for being drunk and disorderly.

There is the pizza place turned upscale Italian eatery
Where I waited for prison bus to preparatory school.

There is Uncle Dante’s who painted his little place
Neon pink to please his nieces, aged seven and nine.

There is the Arab market boss that pays in six silver dollars
                                                                                        Of both strong women and one gleaming fifty-cent piece.

%

I try to work out the exact percentage
Of my day of thoughts, break them into               pie pieces
Or bars for a whole graph that would
Explain the sum total of Gnostic vision
Versus thoughts about lunch or sex or                       0.

Here is the breakdown:

58% of my day is spent in fantastic scenarios.
22% of the drive I masturbate my large ego
with delusions of grandeur and potency supreme.
14% of the time is devoted to mental battles
with radio hosts and other drivers, clients that
treat me as a servant boy or call me “kid.”
4% of the time I complain and try to figure out
where I went wrong that I am 34 and a driver
of a bread van during the day, a teacher at night,
and still not paying the bills, getting my piece of the     pie.

2% is spent talking to the dead.


^

we wore this on our HMMV’s
in the first war in Iraq, all allies
painted ^’s to let us know not
to shoot them. Problem was the
enemy caught wind and painted
^’s on their trucks also and had
men with Ak-47’s inside horse’s
belly that shot at sitting duck troops
after the cease fire. I got shot at
by a Toyota small bed truck with
a big black ^ painted on the side
sloppily with oil-based paint that
melted and dripped in the desert
heat. They said they were friends
and then fired at our Field Hospital,
the OD green trucks stretchers trailers
in a circle like wagons on a western
trek to find gold circling against
Aboriginal threat. I never thought
Names were important really until
I experienced war. Naming’s hidden
Power is neither deception nor truth;

It is in the ambiguity of named groups

where the asp den awaits damned descent
Of intruding foot or soft ankle bare in black.

&

And what about the first time I drove
Any length any vehicle, not to mention
A hmmv. And what was the colonel thinking
With this wild eyed kid in charge of his fate? Life
Must have seemed comically ironic to him as I battled
With the alien right and left pedals of the hugenormous truck
That I was sending careening left and right to avoid the craters
Left by our bombs that he might die in a traffic accident caused by
A teen driver with, as he used to complain to his wife when back home,
No Fing common sense or world experience. And I got him there in one piece, to see
 the effort back in Iraq to help refugees. And I was left there. He drove himself back to base.

*
I have a habit of thinking
So intently to the radio
That I forget the road.

I rarely try to call in to win
This or that or cash for cash
Wednesday and kick myself
When joe smo or little miss
Know it all win the grand prize—
Why can’t I be them, now, inside
The moment of hearing Radio voices
Inflect and uninflect  like a large bird
Flapping its large wings like a small
One, that type of speed and power, hummingbird fast, say             “YOU Are AaaAA WinNeR!”

My envy is short winded.
I change the station to forget
The good fortune of others.


 
( )

I learned to drive stick
At an intersection (towing a boat and in summer traffic that led into a circle[this same circle I ride now to get to Ocean City to drop bread to OC Sacko’s subs] )

And later I learned how
Not to lurch forward (a day long lesson readied me for that first Jeep Bobby gave me [after dad died and I started my slow healing with cigarettes and 4X4ing] )

And soon I was riding
Back trails with ease (except when the water would be too deep and bury the tailpipe in bubbling [today there is a recreational park in the place of the dirt road] )

And then I was teaching
My wife manual in Idaho (before she was my wife and when I packed on the pounds with red meat and beer [almost two years sober now and eating more green] )

How to maneuver snow
And use one hand to steer (to drive me home from the few bars or restaurants we frequented when I had too many [most of the time still wanting one more]).

These parentheticals of our lives could in turn have parentheticals of their own (and those might also go on, survive through simple replication and remembrance).

A road is a string of eternal tangential parenthetical phrases
Laid out in the open, naked in winds of erosive time and

With no road crew to fill in and fix the road to the real grand secret,
the mystery has become a worn out craterous and weakened road
quite like the one I knew in Iraq, unlike the roads I ride today lined
with corporate giants fast food joints banks and churches advertising               God
(except for the out of the way stops, like the Railroad Café or Nino’s,
when I drift into hopes for home and lull myself into tree wrapped life
with the marshes and trees and grasses and animals dead and alive                   speaking to me in

swaying in the breeze tranquility of  unconquered wilderness, breathing
hope into my lungs, making my day sufferable and making me turn off             the Radio noise).

                                      The Road of Life

is one that takes getting used to, but to really see the elusive trees                     of the Garden

we need to spark up in the darkness of this time’s despairing masses
light the way for all those human drivers buzzing forward in automated
life and senseless RITUALS, SO when they arrive give them                                             manna and water
filled with life, bid them smoke and sing and become one force driving
a gargantuan bus, not a human machine, but flying carpet bus carrying

the gang of the cosmos to the truth written on dark matter in the universal      language of love.


I think as my final thought of the day, while talking to dad in the clouds over the mall
And checking for that pesky cop that sits behind the billboards: angels live at the end
Of all human roads to take us to our eternal home in the stars, where we drift drift drift
In the radiant love of all creation, all time our warm water bath when muscles no longer
Ache and we finally can view our lives as a movie, the details and near misses exposed
As the art that life is, that holy and reverent statue of legacy is not only for living drivers,

The dead hear our thoughts for them
They make the road seem less dangerous
And when they speak they speak through
Trees and clouds and that wonder derived

And in road’s pavement their memory survives
Etched in tire marks like magnificent fingerprints
Stretched out across the world, omniscient in the                                      Race to the End of Time
                                                 Knowing full well                                    we all will finish simultaneously.