February 2024
Author's Note: I spent my early adult years in Wisconsin, land of polka, brewskis and brats. These are poems from those days. They are from my second book, My Life in Cars. I now live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Every morning between 8 and noon if I am not in the hospital where I work as an OT, I am in a small room I built for myself. Writing is my joy.
Wheels of Desire
I had a beaut of a ‘60 Chrysler my second year in Wisconsin at a college perched atop a limestone ledge beside Lake Michigan which seethed and sawed at its horizon. Pushing buttons on the car’s dash, I’d jolt from Park to Neutral, Neutral to “Drive.” Then stomp that petal down. Make Goodyears eat the highway up. My monstrous Chrysler was bronze. Had fins fit for a shark at the back. The speedometer was a red bar that raced to the right and lay inside a ginormous bubble round as Alan Shepard’s helmet which put his head in a fish bowl as he golfed on lunar dust. Mostly the Chrysler collected what ice and snow winds off Lake Michigan delivered for months on end. Dried-up, curled leaves lay frozen in the wiper’s gutter, I’d curse and jab a scrapper down along windshield glass. Try to turn that bastard over and keep it going so I could get to a two-bit drugstore job. Those were strange times. The night was bigger because I had so little reference on it. Stroking a co-ed was pure electricity. I wasn’t always sure why I studied what I studied. But come Saturday I had a bronze Chrysler ready for blast off. Fish fins with red tail lights sliced through swirls of snow as we raced into the headlands of desire, which might have just meant picking up pepperoni pizza, as after all, I was in Wisconsin.
Originally published in My Life in Cars.
On the Loose
for Gary Beaumier A friend and I hitched to Mad-town in a blizzard in January of ‘70 before Nixon got impeached – around the time he cooked up a “Draft Lottery” which gave Gary a bull’s-eye on his back when his birthday was pulled at number seven. Sent me skipping free with number two-one-three. We shivered in the back of a sled - Buick Electra - whose heater didn’t have much left to give. Listened to cousins who handed back cans of Schlitz from six packs they kept at their feet under a towel. The interstate was well salted; single file where a dozer blade had passed, packed a running C-shaped wall to the right. Fat flakes in constellations on the windshield melted by the time the wiper slid up, got shot to diamond in the rare moments when Eastbound headlights speared into the cab. These cousins had picked us up outside of Waukeshaw where we shivered under hoods. Hopped side to side. Listened to the crunch, peculiar whine this sort of snow makes under boots. No holding us back. There were co-eds in Mad-town we just knew wanted to meet two farm town yokels who could recite all of Dylan’s, all of Simon and Garfunkel’s, lyrics like they were poems. Anyway, these guys were lit and talking it up. One said “Remember that time I picked Stan up from the state house?” We went to that dive in Saint Paul. It was freezing like this and everybody got totally shit-faced tossing back boiler-makers ‘til Glen sailed off into sting-butt cold to start doing somersaults and handstands up and down Main Street under the street lights. We all did ‘til finally, and sure enough, the law showed up. So we went from drunk and disorderly to drunk and orderly in the flash of a lighter, just to keep Stan from going straight back to the slammer in Faribault. Now that was living.” The cousins set us down in front of the Rathskeller which was covered in snow but still glowing like a flashlight under a blanket with a kid up way past lights-out reading fast from a book he just knows contains everything he can ever imagine and then some.
Originally published in My Life in Cars.
When I First Heard “Black Magic Woman”
I remember that guitar curled, peeled off ribbons that ended somewhere above, and behind as we flew up I-94. Gulped wind, headlong drunk, keen-eyed. The hearts of wolves in bone cages. I remember the size of darkness. The fantastic scroll and flow of bent steel that cried out, with elegant intent, as it escaped from the radio of a Dodge that didn’t much care where it was headed over pavement poured from one side of the country to the other, under street lamps that can’t even begin to expose how much hunger and ache any one night contains.
Originally published in My Life in Cars.
©2024 Ed Ruzicka
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