Car Poems

Where is the Jim Crow section
On this merry-go-round,
Mister, cause I want to ride?
Down South where I come from
...

I was hoping to be happy by seventeen.
School was a sharp check mark in the roll book,
An obnoxious tuba playing at noon because our team
Was going to win at night. The teachers were
...

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
...

So they bought you
And kept you in a
Very good home
Cental heating
...

Last night I drove a car
not knowing how to drive
not owning a car
...

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
...

I wake up in the morning and pull back the curtains, wide,
And look out through the window to view the world outside,
To see if the sky is blue or grey, sunny or with rain,
And see if the postman's on his way with letters that contain,
...

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard
...

'The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.
Our magnolia blossoms.Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
...

Here on the Hard, you're welcome to pull up and stay;
there's a flat fee of a quid for parking all day.

And wandering over the dunes, who wouldn't die
...

Philip Le Barr,
Was knock down by a car,
On the road to Mandalay.
He was knocked down again
...

O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors:
The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark
Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs,
Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.'
...

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
...

O Venus, beauty of the skies,
To whom a thousand temples rise,
Gaily false in gentle smiles,
...

stuck in the rain on the freeway, 6:15 p.m.,
these are the lucky ones, these are the
dutifully employed, most with their radios on as loud
as possible as they try not to think or remember.
...

—he's a dandy
—small moustache
—usually sucking on a cigar
...

At ten AM the young housewife
moves about in negligee behind
the wooden walls of her husband’s house.
I pass solitary in my car.
...

That boy I took in the car last night,
With the body that awfully sagged away,
And the lips blood-crisped, and the eyes flame-bright,
And the poor hands folded and cold as clay --
...

At the time, I was a five-year old boy
A visit to my aunty, always a joy
My cousin was playing with cars at the back
He just had a new one, the body in black
...

The wind
Undecided
Rolls a cigarette of air
...

The history of the car starting with Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot
Building the first steam-powered road vehicle in 1769
The French inventor taking this technology as a good sign
While the Swiss inventor François Isaac de Rivaz
...

She was driving her new car that had advanced safety features.
She was just about to hit a small car when her car braked on its own.
What a relief she thought.
But in the same instant a Mack Truck rammed into the side of her car.
...

I am a victim of beauty! It chases me like a hunter chases the wild animal in a forest. It is not that it finds me on its own: I always walk into its trap willingly like a fool. Because life the catalyst in life's milieu incites me to search for something that I do not know, in every created object. Usually when my vision sights something, I experience a strange pleasure not comparable to any pleasure familiar to all people. I cannot face this pleasure and I feel at once vanquished before it. It is such a total surrender to it, that it is equal to instantaneous death. Sometime later I come out of it limping, due to the unremitting monster of life knocking at the door of my consciousness. Then perhaps I am said to be living; although I feel I was pulled out of that state of being like the dentist pull out the tooth. I am an addict of this killer pleasure and my so-called life is but a string of alternating moments of living and dying.

Why do I search for such pleasure so obstinately and why do I die in the process and why does it not deter me from the search. It is strange but true. May be it happens to may other people too, but their number in the world is I suppose infinitesimally small. Can you explain the experience of this pleasure? No. Sometimes I doubt whether it is pleasure at all, because even deep sorrow either mine or more so of the other person, catches me in the grip of a similar state of mind. You melt now into some primordial liquids and flow away, so to say. It maybe rather like an intense involvement with something. It is more poignant when that something is other than your subjective-self. Perhaps Buddha passed through this moment when he saw an old and shriveled man and a dead body on the street and plummeted into a lightening decision to leave his wife, his child and his kingdom, to go and melt away like a granule of salt in the vast ocean of humanity.
...

Last week while I slept, my damn neighbor decided to rob me.
He stole my car which was an identical copy of the General Lee.
As I painted the car, he told me not to include the flag that was on top.
When he saw me adding the flag, the damn fool demanded that I stop.
...

To this day, the coolest car I've ever known was our Ford Falcon.

What I understand now, at the time could only feel, was what made this the coolest car ever—wasn't what the car was—but what my father made it become.
...

(in answer to Robin Camhee)

On a lovely Sunday morning you asked me to go with you
to do shopping at Carnival Mall in Brakpan,
...

(in answer to Robin Camhee)

On a lovely Sunday morning you asked me to go with you
to do shopping at Carnival Mall in Brakpan,
...

The winter rain was pouring down
while with the yellow BMW
I was going through the mountain pass
when suddenly the mountain came alive,
...

'Give me a ticket,
Give me a ticket''
said an old man
in the railway
...

i have a car
you have a car
we have a car
...