This week let’s write a driving poem or maybe a nobody’s driving poem. A couple of weeks ago Living Poetry attended a Science Cafe at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences where we heard a lecture on self-driving cars. Tara Lynne Groth, Anna Weaver and I wrote poems during the presentation and read them to the audience. You can watch the video below then post your poem in the comments.
Living Poetry
A group of poets and poetry readers.
Monday Poetry Prompt: Driving
Living Poetry 
Before I watch, I just did a second (final) draft of a poem about driving for a contest. Considering that I was in the trucking business for 35 years, I should be able to do a bunch of driving poems, but so far only this:
Portrait Three—Howard the Cat
Nobody has to tell you what the gear shift rod is a metaphor
for in this 13 speed big rig roaring into the Mojave on I-15 down
the west side of the Sierras near Mountain Pass, CA back about ’78.
That skinny-assed son-of-a-bitch sitting next to me high in the air seat
resting his grimy right claws on the knob of the long hard stick knows too.
I had just woken up groggy as hell from working 48 hours straight clearing
out a big TV exhibition in Vegas and raise my blurred eyes above the
shiny beige top of the door body to the bottom edge of the passenger
side window and the white fence posts are going by like a movie film with
most of the frames cut out. But it’s the unearthly quiet that woke me up.
I’m the young boss of this crazy bastard, more or less, though it’s never clear
to me or anyone if Howard actually has a boss. Howard the Cat: so called
after his first big trip coast-to-coast came to a sudden close during a hurricane
in Oklahoma. He was following Tommy, another skinny, but old, riverboat gambler
looking kind of senior driver from St. Louis, old back then being 55, who took
the reckless young Navy sailor under his wing when Howard first signed on to drive for us.
Tommy was skinny too, but he drove for twenty years before power steering came along,
and his hands and forearms were so big it looked for sure like he was going to fall
forward every time he reached out to a counter to sign his paperwork or
pick up a glass of Black Velvet straight, no ice.
The daggone hurricane remnants flipped Howard’s entire rig off the bridge
of the one interstate to land upside down across the southbound lanes of the
one below the overpass, and lucky for Howard he only used up one life this time
due to the cab coming loose from the chassis on the way down and shooting off
in the red clay muck till it gently stopped. No one knows how, but it was right side up.
“Damn it, Howard,” I say, “Exactly how fucking fast are we going right now?” He looks
right and flashes his nicotine caffeine black-toothed crooked smile, gapped in the
top middle where he still hadn’t had time to get teeth to replace the two knocked out
by the steering wheel that day in Oklahoma, pushing to meet a schedule on another show—
the only injury the mangy son of south Ohio got, with his preternatural aptitude
for somehow always landing on his feet.
“Hunnerd an’ ten,” he spits, cigarette ash dropping from the butt he reaches for the
same time with that right hand, not needed for anything else, since holding on to the
friggin’ wheel doesn’t seem to occur to him as something important enough to do.
“I took her outta gear a few miles back – saves diesel. With this thing full up with freight
and our weight, we’ll make it half-way ‘cross the desert ‘fore I have to rev her up
and try an’ figure out what gear to pop it into.”
Well, damn. I knew this ride to Anaheim for the next show was going to be faster than the daggone plane, but this was my first time flying in a freakin’ truck.
It was dark and there wasn’t much to see so I said the hell with it and went back to sleep.
This short one is related to driving too and it actually presages the idea of the driverless car since I wrote it originall about eight years ago. I like writing about Jack Kerouac; I find his biography and times very interesting:
Life Is Just a Road in the Fog
What all humans have in common
is what they don’t know.
Angelaurelio Soldi
The Chinese philosopher, Chuang
Tzu, wondered if his whole life
had been nothing but a dream.
I met Jack Kerouac, picked
him up hitching in the mist
of I-40. He said life
is Benzedrine and booze, a
fast car and a little sex, but
if you don’t write it down
man, did it happen? One
of us got out later.
The car kept going.
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Posted by Cal Nordt | October 23, 2017, 10:58 AM