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w e s t w a r d h o, o r t h e m i g r a t i o n o f g u i l t
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R Y A N G . V A N C L E A V E
Pitchless hum of miles pouring past, there's nothing in the Dodge Dart
but me and America (with a capital A),
glowing like two tequila worms doused with a little Uranium-238,
and we're sweeping up
the hillsides through this fall night like the golden-red combination
of azaleas exploding into bloom;
time is our synchrony out here where the humid scent of barnacles
swirls up from some unseen sea
ever here in the oil-drum belly of Kansas, and we're the only great
shape swimming toward lighter water,
a sea turtle with rusted eyelids and honeycomb teeth. Suppose
I've got a painter's sensibility,
that I know a little something about passing a bottle of tokay
with wino-artists; what then?
The horizon beckons like a purple Elvis velvet painting and all
I can think of are the whale-bodied
hills ahead and what slaphappy fools we are to plunk down rent
each month in the land of opportunity
where folks like Packers fans have their Green Bay trailer-sized
homes, a hunting cabin up nearer
to Canada, and another small lodge in Ellison Bay in Door County
where (only in America) you can buy
she-male porno next door to where an ex-Amish woman named Mary
makes the best almond fudge in the universe,
bar none. So it's just me and America in my $2,800 junk-clunker
struggling through Houston, Little Rock, Reno,
no real trajectory other than away because I'm permanently twisted
from bending over backwards
to pay for new spark plugs, to cover a Waffle house tab, to pay
for these new glow-in-the-dark heelstripe Nikes
some Papua New Guinea child stitched together for eleven bucks
only to haven them passed off now
as hundred-and-ten dollar bargains (blow-out, bust-up, slap-me-if-I'm-
kidding lowest prices around!) and maybe
it wouldn't be so bad, such a damn lonely trip, if I could ditch the Georgia
logger who won't stop with his "Dollar to a donut,
we'll see a Hawaii license plate in five minutes," or William Clinton
(that sexual vampire) and the WWF maestro,
The Undertaker, in all his luminous facepaint, and it's pretty clear
that by America I mean everybody's here
in my lime-colored, hatchback 1979 Dodge Dart that's mulepathing
towards the Mojave like a leviathan
eternally hunting for more space, and before long, there's Juan Valdez
moaning in his flat ungoverned tone
about purified souls and I wonder about our culture and how quickly
it's devouring itself in the name of Jesus
and the strange religion of capitalism where He With The Biggest Wallet
Wins, a shift towards the slippery and dangerous
that happened halfway through my frightfully short life. Starving heart
tattoos and bowling alley nighthawks,
I see them all as I whiz past at 67 mph, and I think "Here's a narrative
about Fear, about Inertia," and I don't know
whether I mean them or me, but that's the point, isn't it? Out here,
in this untranslatable last gasp towards
the final frontier, it's all a kind of frenzied, jackhammer second-guessing
as I wonder what "individual liberty"
really means, and if by virtue of living in the 90s that my one-eyed
babysitter (Lynda) who couldn't pronounce
"Chappaquidick" is truly "empowered." But westward still, the dawn's
ballyhooeing in the rearview, caring not a whit
for ballooning insurance, the FED, or sales tax on a pair of velcro-sealing
diapers, and I see it blossom with flame, an effigy
like the day Vanna White quit "Wheel of Fortune," and I feel it knock
inside me like a jingoistic campaign slogan
I can't shake from my head-oh, how I want to warm my little tootsies
by the heat of those magnificent flames,
and in this moment, key yanked from the ignition, I'm triumphantly human.
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