Night Drive

Roadlight licks the night ahead, licks the white line on night’s new hide, licks the undulating blacktop flat, sticks its end- less forking tongue out onward, flicks itself at culvert, tree, passing truck, a sign insisting heartbeats equal conscious life (it may be) of someone’s (maybe my) forever unborn child. I let the knife of wind inside and sing A Whiter Shade of Pale, no earthly reason why, and think of what won’t be and who, and whether it be speed, wind, song, or my mind’s roar that drowns for once time’s slangy whine, here comes hope to climb clear of before; stillborn hope with desperate, Moro-reflex, undead grip climbs right back up my neck, raising each pointless, residual nape hair in ancestral salute to an absence, to the air that won’t question itself, won’t ever check the moral rearview. I accelerate gamely, wondering what makes me want to leave each person, place and thing I learn to love. What shoves me off again, racing insanely, as if to the place that will always save a place for me, a room that will contain the kind of people who’d embrace the things I’m still afraid I’m still afraid to face.