a license plate tells me so
not on Kansas, or Indiana,
nor anywhere else we'll drive tonight.
There's tar on my tongue, and friction
from shifting against the naugahyde.
Maybe the more I smoke the faster we'll go,
maybe the stars will jump state
catch up to us and hitch a ride.
Our radio screeches static;
don't look now, pow! pow!
a phalanx of signal towers pop like lite-brite,
where do their alien beams go?
O great midnight bulbs and vacant night,
deliver us to Colorado
we two, poor, shooting stars
hauling ass through heartland.
The street in front of my house woke up. It put on its slacks and walked out onto the
interstate to join Ike who was throwing down asphalt like a West Point trained
abstract expressionist. This was falling in love just inches off the ground at 65 mph.
Eisenhower afternoons. Under the all-observing sky. With the road reaching out
to stores. The stores becoming shopping strips and strips turning into strip malls
and malls into super malls; men into supermen with superwomen in chrome fired rocket
ships solid like Ike himself maybe raising a glass with the Rat Pack maybe going to
separate beds with Dick and Laura Petrie or laughing like the studio audience at the
Price is Right and expanding with joy as we teach the world our song in a high-octane
chorus line along a wobbly equator in the slow after-glow of Hiroshima with the sun
setting in earnest behind the final cities of the west.