Headlights breaking over the ridge,
rain obscured windshield,
with the wipers squeaking
like new shoes-
uncomfortable,
uneasy on the firmament.

The grass at attention
in the cold drizzle
of fall, the leaves
freeing themselves
to fall under tires,
in gutters.

As my knuckles whiten
across the steering wheel,
white on black leather,
my chilled fingertips
frozen to the vehicle.
We are one,
this machine
breathing with my lungs
that cannot get at the air.

Gasping like an asthmatic,
great shuddering hollow breaths
like running a marathon.

Slick road beneath
my feet,
black tires
and I am attached. Making
sounds to cover the radio,
covered by the dancing of
rain on the windows,
primal guttural
calls back to my mother,
some cosmic body
I was detached from.

Ventriloquist
these sounds cannot be mine,
someone throwing them into my mouth,
a name on my tongue that I can't speak
even with my best concentration.

No, blurry-eyed so the streetlights dazzle
like fireworks, I am driving crooked on the straight roads
home, and I am not ever sure I am going
to the right one.

The sounds filling me up
and sputtering out of me,
held up in my bones until
the cold broke them open.

In the rain the ground
releases its steam,
soft smelling of verdant things,
and so my face opens up
to let out all the water dammed up,
all the screeches I didn't let
out at birth,
the breaking through
of something of the Natural State.

Clawing from me lungs
taking all the air they can
grasp, not enough
as the windows fog
from this-

the microcosm outburst
of the return to
primal things,
as at red lights
I scream at oncoming traffic,
my face buried in sweating palms.
Here, I am again
in the madness
I came from.