Everything is a choice—and there’s that squealing car
that distracts and kidnaps the moral lesson I hoped
to oath in as a witness for my case; engine rev
and synthetic thumps on the rain-slicked road
bathed in stoplight. But there’s time enough
to wait out the ransom here in the patient morning
hours of my memory, where it’s summer and sunny
and the pool is a cool turquoise—the splash of droplets
jump to follow the Chevy Corsa down the empty avenue,
through the side streets where homeless ball up
on cardboard below awnings, the neon still spastic
inside the quiet glass that puts food on wooden tables
far from this urbanization. Everything is a choice,
and I chose to think of you—the moral inside the trunk
gropes at the metal ceiling for some latch, some plastic
in handle form with glow-in-the-dark instructions
and a string attached to the speeding highway air.
There are hints in the velocity of this sunless dawn
that tell me the moral lesson is gone, that everything
is just a choice, the rest a restless mind backpedaling.
LOCATION: Porto Alegre, Brazil – Writing e-mails and staying busy with my general insomnia; just learned how to convert free domain ebooks to formats compatible with my Kindle.
