"But first, baby, as you climb and count the stairs (and they total the same), did you, sometime or somewhere, have a different idea?
Is this, baby, what you were born to feel, and do, and be?"

-Kenneth Fearing



Friday, December 16, 2011

Driving Back From Hollywood


*



Traffic was crawling.
I knew we’d be stuck for hours,
gaining inches at a time.
You asked me what I thought.
I said, “Different, than I expected.”

 
The stars on the street didn’t shine.
The musicians played for change,
and the town didn’t seem to know
that it leaves you dirty.

My thoughts were broken up,
sighting a traffic obstruction;
A truck had spilled a load of lemons,
covering the road with yellow skin,
crushed by many tires into something like steam
that flooded the nostrils of everyone driving through,
like a hanging air freshener magnified
thousands of strengths.

As much as we hated traffic,
nobody honked their horn
or cursed for quite some time.
The scent was too strong to focus
on anything other than lemon pulp
and yellow peels as far as we could see,
crushed against the highway,
sour and broken and clean.


                                -Brent Allard

2 comments:

  1. Very visual and sensory. I enjoyed this piece.

    http://lyricfire.typepad.com/lyric-fire/2011/12/lyric-fire-my-first-this-moment-post-.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you for checking it out Tameka. APpreciate the kind words!

    ReplyDelete