My Ford Pinto Poem by Sarah Mkhonza

Brown paint almost peeling off,
I drive it down the street windows down.
I see the world, but I also see the bottom
of the world. My Pinto has holes in the
bottom. When I travel, I know the city
down and under.

No truth about what it cost,
Just a heap of car the owner
dumped on me. 'Take it, ' she said
'for any price.' I know I did not
spend much, but the love it
brought me was like the day
I had just nothing wrong,
and called a man to fix it.

He looked at me and thought
I was crazy, to ask him to just
put it down, this whatever was wrong
for the Pinto was ready to go.

Next time you buy a stick shift,
don't lose yourself in the shift.
The stick still waits for you,
to change gears like I did.
As I roared on Highway 69.

I had to go to the movies.
I had bought the best car
in the world ever made. To me
it was heaven, so small so short.
I wished there would be an antique
car club, that would take it and go
and keep it for posterity.

If you ever loved a car,
one similar and small,
you feel what I touched,
and laughed inside for years
and then moved on, like
a guy leaving a lady,
whose thoughts will always
come back for he wishes
he had married her and not
ride her like my pinto.

Oh how miss it so, now that cars
are about glowing paints,
and not the love of cruising
in the fossil of a car you love.
When I loaned it to someone,
they surely heard from me,
before the day was over.

For a car is not a thing to lend
around like a pair of glasses.
It is a thing that when people
look at, they say here she comes,
meaning both you and the car.

Regret can never help
when years pass and
down the road, I keep
imagining it is coming
this little buzzard, this pinto
ever so mine to be always mine
even when I do not know which
scrap yard it is. which is blest
to be the resting place of
the love I shared with the road,
that carried us both.

When faithfulness depends on me,
I do keep the faith and expect you,
to do like wise. I feel the Pinto feels
that when it came to it, I broke a vow
that was never made on the bible,
and therefore went with time.


When friends came to borrow her,
I should have known that deep down,
I should tell them the truth, that we
never really share such things, because
our hands on the stirring wheel are not soft,
for the car knows this. Tell it what you are,
it tells you what it is. Now that it is lost,
only my hands remember very well,
what was said between the two of us,
for the touch is stronger than the throw,
when it is the last throw for you remain,
holding on to air.