drive

it was when they said
drive safe that i knew
i had wobbled,
that choreography
of descent into
sobbing, the blips
and lapses in purpose,
elliptical shaking
of the head, a scratch
in the disk, the anvil
of for the first time
seeing yourself
as villain, as toothrot,
as pedestrian extraordinare,
an offshoot, the darker
way home. the clip
board thrown, the oval
onus of the eye avoided,
i had to get out of there,
felt the sticky whispers
cling to my spine,
the moment he walked
into that room i became
your second most important,
an errand boy mixed up
in the payroll, an afterthought
fixture — worst is
my own initiative, my blunt
betrayal to morality
or whatever makes the most of you,
this fixation to delve
for however far hits the bottom,
to see where it takes the most of you,
all of it, and what these nights
mean to me then, waiting
on the window to defrost
in the dead eye of winter,
how green this night
looks in my rear-view mirror,
and then red again