Road Rage
On my way to work.
11 points on my license ––
one more and I’m fucked.
So I’m in the slow lane this morning,
moving along at a steady 65,
doing my best to keep my temper in its cage.
To my left, I see a guy zoom past
while reading a newspaper on his steering wheel.
I pretend to have imagined it.
Next up on the shit show
is a huge, attention-diverting billboard,
which reads, in black, bold letters,
“NO TEXTING! NO DISTRACTIONS!“
When I nearly rear-end the car in front of me,
the oxymoronic nature of this sign is magnified ––
spiking my anger through clouds.
But I bite my lip, rub my eyes,
and decide to flick on the radio.
I take a breath and begin sifting through songs:
“Happy” by Pharrel Williams,
“Best Day of My Life” by American Authors,
“On Top of the World” by Imagine Dragons ––
too many blindly optimistic musicians for one sitting.
And though I try to avoid getting bitter over it,
all I can think of is how badly
I want to lick the coat of sugar from their double-talk words
and swallow the core of the sadness beneath ––
because that’s the only way to build muscle in the mind.
I switch off the radio and listen to nothing.
There’s some bald guy behind me
in an ugly, green pickup truck
and he keeps riding my tail like it’s mating season.
When I stick my arm out the window
and motion for him to go around me, he just inches closer.
It makes me wish I had a bumper sticker that said,
“NEVER TAILGATE A PESSIMISTIC NIHILIST.”
“Fuck it,” I say,
slamming on my brakes,
hearing the skid, and letting the stench
of burnt rubber crawl its way up my nose.
And then I watch the guy in my rearview mirror ––
I watch him flailing about like a schizophrenic turkey.
He swerves into the middle lane, speeds past, gives me the finger.
I respond with a wave and a smile.
It’s 7:30 in the morning
and I’m already worn out––
cruising in my automatic car with my automatic rage ––
triggers everywhere: the half-assed heat,
the cramped interior,
cracked windshield, rock-hard seats.
“Okay,” I tell myself, “relax.
There are starving children in Africa.
You don’t have it that bad.”
But then I think of those children and envy them
for their low expectations.
(Hand them a glass of clean water and they’re ecstatic.
But Americans? Give us a Porsche
and we’ll complain we wanted a Ferrari.)
Anyway…I’m at a red light now.
There is a bar on the corner.
Two middle-aged men walk out of it,
both swaying, both obliterated as Hell ––
yet…they get in two separate cars and speed away.
(Yesterday, a cop pulled me over
for doing thirty in a twenty-five.
Where’s that idiot now?)
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
As I merge onto the freeway, the scenery shifts:
a cloud disintegrates, exposing the sun
and I find myself wishing the light would fuck off.
I pull down my sun visor and there
in the mirror, I see a gray hair on my head
I hadn’t noticed before.
Reminder to myself:
at least I’m getting closer
to paradise.
B. Diehl co-authored of the poetry chapbook Temporary Obscurity (Indigent Press, 2015) with Charles Joseph. He is also the sole writer of the full-length poetry collection Zeller’s Alley (White Gorilla Press, 2016). When he is not writing, you can usually find him at home, hanging out with his cats and/or feeding his social media addiction. He still lives with his parents.
