—Behind the Wheel (Cinnte)
I wrote a personal essay titled “Behind the Wheel” in my senior year of high school, and this following verses are culled from that text directly (with extra bits added in here and there for rhyme and reason). The backing track is Cinnte, by Nouveaunoise.
You can forget the darkly funk
it’s easy to get wasted and stop
and every so often
it’s within your power
to notice the orange tinted edge
of the otherwise
starkly red flower.
I was young once,
I used to laugh at things and mean it
I used to have so much fun
that the laughter was literally
pushed out of my lungs.
When we went out
behind my house
mosquitoes ticks and gnats lived
within glass and thorns and trash
and we trampled through
and we were happy as youths.
If I could go back,
and meet myself in the rough
I would whisper in my ear
that the let-down would be coming
soon enough.
(that might seem harsh, but would you let let a child adopt a puppy that you know is terminally ill? In this metaphor, the puppy is my innocence.)
I don’t want God to think he got me
so I opt to shop around
I imagine he giggles he gets
from his holy station
watching church-folk
invest in salvation
with a buck in the collection plate.
The lighter side of a dark affair
if I was god I wouldn’t share.
I haven’t so far
I write new faces every day
and I hit them with cars.
So many ways to kill a man
but few as surprising as
the shock of that slam
that which was set intact
fractures on the unannounced
wet impact
splitting skulls
and deflating lungs
reducing one
to a quivering
heap of guts.
God prefers disease and cancer
though by appearance he’s a killer
in his heart he’s a romantic.
I try to avoid the use
of that which he hath created
lest he think in small some way
that he was my main inspiration
(even if in some small actuality he was exactly that)
I could torture my people
you would agree
if the point of my work
was inducing agony
I could cut them up and fuck them
in the desert to rot and die,
but I love the words that I write
and those who live within the lines.
When I was a kid
towards my creations
I harbored no ill will
still I found a thrill
in that which was killed
hastily amid the crayons
I laid waste as I scribbled on paper
with a knife in the equation
someone will bleed
as I render with a sense of glee.
The years flopped by
like an un-bowled goldfish
my cast began to decay
I was killing as quickly
as I was creating
and so little pleasure now
not the same satisfaction
their deaths used to arouse
the characters aware of this
usher themselves into traffic to be crushed
in a play to provide
a moment of fleeting joy at which I can clutch.
I’m waiting for my own car to come
and take my name
intersections are stressful,
waiting for the lights to change.
I’m naturally impatient,
but I know that there are
certain places worth the wait.
That God of ours well not mine
has a humor in him that will never fade in time
not so long as he stays in practice
we have similar goals and habits
hurling planes
at buildings
to make people scatter,
when their fear weighs their
knees to the earth
they will question
if their prayer on their lips
ever mattered
and when they claim that they
have been abandoned
what course of action is there
but to reprimand them
When they start to sever control
to move on their own
how can I re-gain their faith
other than showing them the insides
of the intricate bodies that I have created?
