How do I speak to 

the gruesomely bowed facia board, 

to the scarred dog-legged 2x4?

 

Do I speak gentle,

"come on, baby,"

sorting out their problems,

coaxing them into place, 

into alignment,

acknowledging their difficulty,

admiring their overcoming?

        “There, doesn't that feel better?”

 

Or do I cuss their deformity?

Do I growl,

prying at their warped spines?

Sending nail after fruitless screw into

their hapless heads and feet?

You motherfucker.

You little bitch.

The man who taught me much of 

the little I know

used to hiss,

eyes stuck wild and open,

frozen, furious, terrified, 

hammer brought downward 

in methodical stabbing arcs, 

"You will comply.

You will comply."

 

        It is in these latter days that I most need relief,

                from the bludgeoning,

                snarling figure looming 

                over me, eyes hollowed-out,

                white chasms, whose first beginnings,

                in some atrocity, some inhuman doings,

                are too far off into the depths of history to be made out.

 

My van’s long-suffering engine

doesn't hiccup and gasp from the rattling depths of its chest

so long as I don't take it more than 30 miles on the interstate at one time,

so long as I don't push her too hard,

or accelerate while the AC runs 

(the AC still runs, bless her heart).

There are explanations,

I'm sure,

for all of her ailments,

but they 

are found in the thin air

of the mountaintop

monasteries of 

automotive knowledge,

far above and beyond

that which I've stitched together 

from under shade trees

and on interstate shoulders,

from screen-cracked videos 

and the grease-spattered pages 

of a tattered blue Haynes book.

I know 

just enough 

to know

not to push her too hard,

to cut the AC off as we climb the hills,

to stroke her dash and whisper to her leaking heart.

 

I have ceased expecting her to be

what she can no longer be,

what, maybe, she never even

had a chance to become.

 

        For her, 

        here nearing her twilight,

        there is no real relief, 

        only an easing up.

 

        For me, 

        at my noonday,

        I need as much relief as I can get.

        And I find it

        where I first found it,

        among the faint earliest light of morning.

        Before even the 

        electrifying brown liquor,

        or the crushed-up back pills,

        or the soft breath of a woman in the curve of the ear.

 

        I find it in the biscuit.

 

        For there is a deep home

        in its salt and 

        in its butter,

        heavy as the grave, 

        aloft as a cloud.

 

In her frontseat, 

when the heavy summer air

wets particles to every fiber,

it can be difficult to tell

the sawdust from the biscuit

crumbs.

 

I am here now,

licking my fingers.

The fine white dust

of winter flour and loblolly pine

a slurry in the butter.

 

To my right, 

through the shotgun

window of my white van,

lies a tunnel of windows,

solitary men in the drivers’ seats

of white trucks and white vans,

staring through their windshields

out onto the industrial parkway,

staring into the screens of their phones,

sucking through straws,

licking at fingers.

 

To my left,

a cop car,

lights on,

and a late-model Ford,

windows rolled down,

trunk popped open,

the belongings of a

hapless driver

laid out in the parkway.

The Ford is empty,

and the cruiser is sealed. 

No human beings can be 

made out at the scene.

No movement can be discerned

behind the sinisterly tinted glass.

 

All of a sudden, 

breaking my tunnel of windows,

a man bolts through the narrow gap

between my truck and the next,

his black uniform T-shirt snow-dusted with 

the copious flour of a morning shift,

his hair still coiffed and eyes still bright,

and springs towards the road,

down the embankment, to an empty bus stop,

where an empty MARTA bus has been idling

for a suspiciously long time on the parkway.

He bounds directly up the steps of the bus,

handing the busdriver a crisp bag, 

likely a biscuit, and, 

without a swipe of a card,

or jangle of a coin,

bounces into a seat.

The driver opens the sack, reaches inside,

and pilots the bus out onto the parkway,

right on time, door to door service,

the most efficient public transit in the world,

democracy at its most simple and most human.

 

        Garrett texts from San Antonio.

        He needs help in finding a show

        somewhere in the deep green land

        between Asheville and Little Rock,

        as I have often come to him,

        seeking a microphone and a roof

        in the saintly scrubby lands that peer

        southwestward into the great adobe expanse.

        He says a promise has fallen through in Nashville.

        (This is like saying it has rained in Seattle.)

        I text Marty about setting him 

        up in Chattanooga. Rock City.

        Where a rocker’s word is solid foundation.

 

        In this way, this driver’s seat,

        gently greased with sweat and butter,

        dusted with yellow pine and salt,

        sheetrock dust and flour,

        has long served,

        in the spare minutes

        of the workday, 

        as my office.

 

Pecking out emails,

squawking into the phone,

snatching up melodies,

scratching down lines,

between bites of a biscuit,

waiting in line at the gravel yard,

parked under a shade tree,

idling at a stop light.

 

The lunch biscuit itself

may originate from a gas station,

wrapped in butcher paper,

its contents scribbled in marker,

kept warm in a plexiglass case,

or from the hand of a hurried

drive-through person in a 

flour-dusted uniform T-shirt,

or from the days-old stock

from my own dusty kitchen,

my rushed morning hands

slicing the cold biscuits in half,

filling them with ham and cheddar cheese,

putting them in the freezer bag,

driving to work, and then

leaving them on the dashboard of the van,

where the arching morning sun will slowly 

bring them, by lunchtime, back to warm, buttery life

and melting union, what Junior called "a redneck microwave."

 

Like many of the men 

who taught me the little I know,

college was not an option for Junior.

 

College was not an option for me, either.

But in the sense that it wasn't an option;

it was a requirement.

 

And when I got out,

I found myself pushing commas around

for a relatively new phenomenon

called an “online publication,”

sending emails, waiting for emails,

sending more emails, learning how typing

various punctuation marks in specific orders

could render letters into italics and bold,

or turn a sentence into a portal to another online publication,

or insert into a paragraph an advertisement for yet another online publication,

and at the end of the day, trying to find any degree of mindpower,

any lingering vision for the written word to point towards a song or a poem.

 

When a billionaire bought out the website,

and "instituted a new model"

(which means "figuring out how to not pay people"),

I and most of my coworkers were laid off.

We were thrown back into searching for work,

spending hours of research and emailing,

just for a chance to write 

for hours upon hours, 

revision upon revision,

to make $250.

 

But I played in a rock and roll band.

I already had one job that didn't pay jack,

and where finding the work 

was more than half the work.

 

So, I decided to go paint houses for my friends. 

 

I could spend 40 hours pressure-washing, 

caulking, painting, and make $400 

(rent back then was $300),

and then just take my ass home 

with a tired body and a fresh mind,

or 

I could spend 60 hours 

chasing down a story or two, 

and chasing down a friendly editor,

studying sentences and words

and their structural elements

until the letters and punctuation

writhed, arbitrary black squiggles

on a white fluorescent screen,

and, if everything went perfectly, make $500

(and four birds in hand are worth five in the bush),

hair pulled out, or eyes rolling in my head,

sick of sitting still,

sick of the English language,

the idea of writing a song,

or writing a poem

about as appealing 

as some nice time working in the garden

to a person who spent all day working in the field.

 

So, I write my songs,

in scraps and in lines,

behind the wheel,

in the sawdust and the crumbs,

between bites of the biscuit.

 

Once, running a load of tile,

or a repaired machine, or

a load of trim (I forget)

back to a jobsite, 

steering wheel in one hand,

biscuit in the other,

I got stuck at one of those

mythically slow industrial-parkway stoplights

(that are infuriating when I’m on my own clock,

and a sweet reprieve when I’m on somebody else’s).

I put the truck in park, set down the biscuit, 

and pull out the tiny guitar whose home is 

hidden behind the shotgun seat.

I begin to pick at it, some handful of chords

or a nagging riff that’s been gathering dust.

Somebody starts honking.

Embarrassed, I start to throw the truck into drive, 

but look up to find that the light is still red.

Grumbling about these honking-ass Atlanta drivers, 

I put it back in park. Keep picking.

In its own epochal time, the light turns green, and,

as I turn right towards the interstate, 

a car swoops in beside me

from the opposite direction. 

Again, there is the honking.

I glance over, snarling. 

There, a guy about my age,

hair arrayed in the short spiky locs of a man 

born to rock and forced to work, 

in a Ford branded with the names of companies 

that have turned his car into their taxi,

waves to me exaggeratedly,

steering with his knees, 

cackling in laughter,

and holds up proudly, beamingly,

as a first-time daddy would his child, 

        his 

        own 

        tiny

        guitar.

I nearly die laughing, honk back, throw up horns.

 

        We accelerate, grinning widely, onto 75 and into our workdays,

        diverging at the 285 split, honking once more, our hearts full in 

        knowing that in a city full of strangers,

        in a machine run for profit,

        we have each other.