Vanishing Point
Caron Andregg
I said I’d had a mid-life crisis
and now I had to pay for it.
He, without skipping a beat, said,
“How many cylinders?Ӡ
There are only so many sports cars
between me and the inevitable.
He knows he could have been one
the cure for crisis, or maybe the cause
it’s hard to tell one from the other
out on the frontier where the white line
smears solid; where the speedometer
pegs its spindle and admits
it doesn’t know.
He has what candles have
that makes moths want to die in them.
We breathe the exhaust
of that combustable love
terminal and incandescent
that consumes as it ignites
with the flint and tinder
of a bad green break.
Things look different at speed
looming larger as the approach
diminishing as they receed
to their vanishing point.
Timelessness doesn’t necessarily endure.
The peals of wheels on asphalt
like the pants of orgasm
only happen in transition;
the explosion soon contracts
the pure flame spends
a passionate accelerant
exquisite and abrupt
a mere extension of oblivion
a sleek and beautiful abutment
against which to crash and burn.
