28) Paul Zarzyski – Monte Carlo Express (1998)
Gitarre: Duane Eddy
I’ve checked fence doing 80 in a low-rider
Chevrolet springing the borrow pit
like a pack mule that hates crossing
running water. The torture is too much
when a week’s worth of mail -stacked
beside me like a high school majorette
beckoning with her baton
decades back when this car was showroom new-
presses against me. I could never wait and still
can’t wait to open what’s personal. Steering
with my knees, jackknife gleaming in my lap,
the wheel tilted down full -The Monte, a roulette
ball blur hugging hot asphalt- I shuffle
through the stack and gamble
once again on 8 miles of 2-lane
straightaway. I Frisbee bills and all business
glassine-windowed envelopes,
in which we poets never receive checks,
over the suicide seat headrest, toss
junk mail to the floor-mat collage
on the shotgun side, stick love letters
between my teeth, and maybe I’m better off
not having tasted perfume
for years. Esquire, slicker than a hot plastic
sack of slimy grunion, slithers and slides
over, under, and between the seats
leaving its Stetson Cologne scent
like a madam’s tomcat mascot marking his turf
on two-for-one night
in a cowboy brothel. Ol‘ Monte drifts
left across the double yellows on a hill
then right, into the shoulder brome, seed heads
whipping the wheel wells clean, dust swirling
in the side mirror, the Day-Glo
rubber fish in place of plastic Jesus
dashing for the stuntmen grasshoppers
suctioned to the windshield,
their front paws clasped in prayers
that must have saved us from the bridge
abutment already signed
with 4 white crosses for those who did not
quite
make
this
curve
because of booze, because of snooze, because of
tire or tie-rod act-of-God failure
of car or heart, or the piss-poor
penmanship of a good friend
loving me almost to cursive death with this letter.
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