Death Rattle
Baby, it’s cold outside
They blocked off Wilmington Ave
2 weeks before Thanksgiving,
Northbound traffic up
Watson Center,
Southbound down
223rd,
and it all came to a head
on Lucerne.
“Back it into the pit,”
he said.
People do some weird shit
under duress:
pick at their fingernails,
smell their armpits,
I knew one girl
who would pull out her own eyelashes;
I asked her out
in the seventh grade
only to be told, “No.”
With traffic coming towards me
from the front windshield
and closing in behind my truck
in the rearview mirror
I remember her answer,
“But you
are
cute.”
What’s a consolation prize
to a man
who now has to focus on two things at once?
You know
life’s kinda rough these days,
Netflix has so many titles
that’s it’s hard to choose,
the poorest in America
are obese,
and the last war on our soil
ended in 1865,
and you still
require a happy ending?
Contradiction is the mosaic
of the Trinity,
three men
on crosses
atop a hill,
two doomed
for damnation,
one deemed
to save us all,
while man’s fall
is saying that he stands for one thing
and doing the complete opposite
under a little stress.
Those who
can
take it
easy,
a man
works his entire life
for a little time
at the end
to be the boss of it,
but what happens
when most of them quit?
On the fifth day
God breathed life into man
and as I flip the splitter
into the low side
and drop it into fourth
I look at my cell phone
to see that I’ve got 5 minutes
until closing time.
There’s this sound
that a person makes before they die,
scientifically
it’s known as terminal respiratory secretions,
but as I hold my hand out the window
to signal to a box truck
that I’m gonna back up
he moves forward;
I rattle the air horn.
Pissed
I look over my shoulder
to see the forklift driver on the dock
walking out into the street
to help me back through traffic,
he stops both ways
and I glide into the hole,
I pull the air brakes and exhale,
“Thanks Ricardo.”
“Looked like a pain in the ass,” he said.