Brake lights flicker in frustration,
Traffic slows in a parade
Of the hidden, soon to be revealed.
The hum of police sirens,
Black tires skid across the pavement,
A truck, caught against the center divide.
Whispers murmur from the bystanders:
“Man, what happened?”
“He better be dead.”
“Jesus, was he drunk?”
“Better him than me!”
“I don’t have time for this.”
The crushed truck’s radio blares David Allan Coe,
The driver’s hand, limp and still,
Unable to turn down the volume,
His final gesture of civility
To the onlookers.
A fireman clicks it off into ghostly silence.
The truck, flawless in its destruction, is surrounded
By flares shrieking danger, yet
Sputtering sweetly, inviting the crowd
To gaze upon the ambulance driver’s
Blood-specked burial shroud.
A sheet is pulled over the body,
To shield any from recognition.
Society’s guardians of anonymity
Stand watch.
The soul, just released and confused,
Follows his wrecked body
To the morgue,
The toe tag fluttering in the breeze
Of the gurney’s slow creak
Down a hollow, bleached corridor.
The liberated, unfettered soul,
Baffled,
Roaming,
Defeated,
Stops,
Spins,
And gazes at his own self on the gurney.
“I am someone!” he cries,
To witnesses unfamiliar
With a soul’s silent, final words.
“My name is Dane,
I am someone’s lover,
Someone’s son,
Someone’s friend,
Someone.”
As Dane wanders,
He sees what should be impossible.
Disbelieving,
Surrounded by questions,
He rummages through hospital corridors.
A comatose woman lies connected
To her fog-shrouded bed.
She hears the returning footsteps
Of her only daughter,
Unable to blink,
To say hello,
But she remembers
Warm beach days,
Picnics,
And kites dancing in the wind.
Dane watches a nurse
Desperate to revive a dead man:
“Clear!”
Sho-Ck!
Electric life flares,
“Clear!”
Sho-Ck, crackling,
“Clear!”
Sho-Ck fails to reboot a lifeless heart.
Dane screams at the unheeding walls,
“What are the odds against defying God
At His own casino?”
Fury propels him onward.
A withered man
Sips tang through a straw,
The only solace for his scorched stomach.
Dane struggles to decipher
What his eyes behold.
Is this heaven?
A nameless woman pushes her baby
Through an irreversible
Canal of blood and water and pain.
The drip and burn of chemo,
Hurting and healing,
Indiscriminate in both.
“Where the hell am I?”
The disembodied Dane shouts,
And as he is ripped upward,
He screeches,
“Let me have just one more glimpse of life,
Just one more time,
To look into the eyes
Of another living
Fallacy of humanity.”
The Fork & Trowel 