Forty Miles From The City Poem by jerome moore

Forty miles from the city.
Their radiator messed up,
the buzzards drooling,
ready to pull the plug.
They have his trumpet,
dry bread, hot water...

The Temp outside is hell
The Earth is hell...
The car looks like hell
An exiled pugilist:
The one hundred reasons just to die,
The chorus is the car radio, It speaks Poetry!
The couple must keep one another awake, not fall asleep.

Somewhere threaded through the canyons is a siren, a coffin spitting exhaust.
The madmen are on fire, the clergymen are visiting the meat-house, the women are in the dusty bars, The children eat ice cream in the morgue, walking the road to el dorado, paved in rhine stone, smog and jazz and crooked mammoths they dream and throw blue silks to the desert sky.

Tomorrow is gonna be one hundred plus and she applies lipstick.
In late evening, two fans circling overhead, they sleep tangled in their mess.
With thumb out to the clouds they begin the doldrums of death.