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.