Dusktime Driving

Minds have moved like long-legged flies upon silence;
mine soars against the singeing, screaming, smoking chords that are
vying with the headwind to fray the spider-strands spun across my open window, while
inexorably behind me come the endless windings and doublings 
of glimmer-pale and twinkling-yellow like the glowworm, hero’s-bane.


The sky ahead is slashed with cloud 
I spin a meditative egg-sac to trim it,
as a voice of gravel and dust licks out syllables that drop under comprehension,
flat on the grinding road.

Cold will come the rising dawn,
after all night riders of adulatory crowds
shall have thundered across the darkling highlands of my conscious dreams
to war with mile-long wights of boredom
that wait by the edges of pale roads andaround the corners of your eyes and
behind the full moon of their lids:
Standing as harbingers of a calm, overtaking doom.


Cold must be the seeping, ever-startling aura that wards off the deadly lull:
A herd of green-glinting feral reminders of your uttermost mortality,
a society that catches so quickly you react at thrice-thought speed,
blinking away the momentary impressions of a satyrs’ colony induced by sound of drums,
and cold is the wheel, the volume knob beneath those trembling fingers 
as the car stereo moves one decibel upwards and the regular swells of power lines flash by

hour
after hour
after hour.


Wake.
The road must have its end at last.