Every east coast lick lapped by thick silver mist.
Rain light as snow might be easier to manage if it had froze.
Whipped jets from eighteen wheels in tread-shredding hurry.
People who play games with their brake lights and cruise control
don’t believe in negative prayers offered around them about them.
No car quick enough can outrun karma. Slick black skeletal mountains
vomit white cascades of frozen-fallen ice. Rock shoulders
lean out over the shoulder and make us shudder passing beneath.
Stress shedding mutt curled up in the backseat. Patience testing
two year old strapped into a carseat just barely pretend-asleep.
A couple curves with fog so thick with steady drizzle we fly headlong
fast enough that any unexpected thing in our path would end us.
Even though it doesn’t, perhaps it also does. Lost.
But for a British voice telling us where to turn. Blind.
But for all our wide open unblinking eyes. Dead.
But for the dutiful heart and grocery bag lungs
that keep us this side of alive. I drive. They ride
and we get there, but not on time. We uncover
the mantra of our middle lives.
Better late than never.
Writer Actor Farmer 
What powerful images, how expertly life turned slow-motion and viewed from the cynical angle of the poet. And what poet! Love it!!
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Thanks so much!
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I could this playing out. Glad you made it home safely!
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I could see this playing out while reading. Glad you’re safely home
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When you make specific references, are they for people to figure out, wonder on their own? Just asking, from the writer’s perspective, when you make almost “inside” references, what do you expect the reader to do?
When I read “British voice”, it took me a minute to realize that it was the voice of the GPS.
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Good question! I’d say just keep reading through it, try to take the poem in one good breath. Then, on a second reading, dig in to some of the inside references, there’s usually clues before and after, just subtle. But sometimes, it is just an inside reference, kind of like carving your initials into a desk or something. Like this actually happened this way, so it’s going in the poem. That happens a lot too haha
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