perishables at the truck stop

these days move  on I 95 lost in gestures
and pizza boxes  traveling with smoke
signal and carrots, organic sweet.
figments of an imaginative fig or some
beautifully bathed circus sister from the thirsty
thirties, last century siren
Accidentally spilling over into otherwise from time to time.


there were accounts in the offices 
of all the times the baby ate pizza for dinner
without salad or the way the guy in the blue ghost
shoes managed to leave me homeless
penniless, jobless in that order. the way the moving
van broke the towed volvo on the night of the memorial
the way we ran out of gas and money 
so close to our new  home it made me  realise
 i'm the flip side of every coin.

so when ralph the cat escaped into the field
filled with thistles and some powder blue flower
i knew was gonna trigger a sinus attack i went after him
armed with nothing more than the memory 
of the smell of tuna on my hands. it worked because
the cytokine storm had passed and all the hemorraghic 
nodes were safe for the moment. he piled into the gassed
up truck with not a scratch, not a hiss. freedom must have 
seen like too big a loss, the night just too full of all those
points of lights moving along way past the limits of speed.