Seeing a city as though it’s a car commercial for my inner child
Highways twist and rise above
as you lean and gaze out the window:
Enraptured at seeing a city
through five-year-old, hayseed eyes,
holding tight as it rolls underneath.
Your astigmatism makes
streetlights into stars so they
can gawk back the same way, in rapt awe
at your vision of untangling those roads alone
When returning someday as a grown-up.
You know then that’s what purpose looks like &
already have it here and in every other place large enough to gnarl roads —
in every car with torque enough to round these carnival-ride
circles traced into the air, sparkling yellow in beckoning lights!
If you’ve never seen places through the view of a car commercial
looking back at itself, I feel sorry to hear it.
You couldn’t be me, child, with that cold, pitiful face
that only wakes you as your head thumps the window
as you’re rolling into a rest stop for someone else’s piss and soda.
Take the road abbreviated by food smells and speed bumps:
— around those bends drawing you
stomach-throated into the side-door!
Where wind rushes your senses as only cities can
and sight explodes into scintillation —
To find where you’re five again.
© Maggie McCombs 2024. All Rights Reserved.
