Guitar Player Between Towns Poem by Matt Mullins

He counts time to the metronome slashes
of white center-line that refuse to fall into song
as his headlights switch on the amplified eyes
of deer powered up to spring into the full
volume of collision's opening bars. This is
the encore no one asks for, the tune no one hears
a tablature of back-roads high-beamed
into stark contrast, his car a final bullet
breaking radio silence to report the soundtrack
of long thoughts, lyrics to questions he feels
but will not ask: Whose guitar is this dumb in the trunk?
Whose amp rattling its electric guts to the syncopations
of each rut and bump? Whose map taking him
the long way around the speed traps and breathalyzers
only to pass the sudden mirage of a road-side circus
where night's risky travelers put heel to toe
along a painted high wire, sway beneath the spinning lights
speak backwards in tongues before being
shown to their second row seats? Somehow it's still

the mission the kid stepped forward for at thirteen.
Night beyond night, gig after gig, he remains
that bloody-fingered kid cutting himself into posters
tacked above stained sheets. This is why he hauls
his gear through the smoke and explosions
of drunken laughter, scuffs his boot heels across
the gritty exclamations of shattered glasses licked
into sharp, wet mounds by the bouncer's angry broom
because there is nothing louder than the silence
of his own disbelief. When, exactly, did he become
this guitar player between towns, the echo of a sound
shot solo through the dark to burn the night miles
toward home after yet another show? Seems to him
it's been this way ever since he was old enough
to take the wheel: his head a transistor, his clothes soaked
in a barroom's ashtray, an evening's thin pay riding

between his back pocket and the seat the only proof
that he lives anything beyond life in a rehearsal space.
All he can tell you is that sometimes his aim is true.
Some nights the stars' polarities do align and he takes hold
to become an instant's connection in the circuitry of flesh
and steel and wood and bone. Wood and bone. Flesh
and steel. Wheels against the road. These
are the passing notes to the songs in a set list
he'll always know, the blue chords he leaves hanging
from a rusty finger-bone driven through the spine
of a backstage door before he shuts his guitar case
like a coffin lid and lights out of town. These
are the nights he keeps an ear to the rearview mirror
while his car drums the length of a.m. road
asphalt peeling back like the curl of a snapped string
each time he hears something leaping into the plucked
air of his wake.