Anger can erupt like a lawn mower pieced together

Suddenly exploding

Yellow jackets

But it’s a mistake to thank fate

For the extra skin of denim

Draped around your tender ankles

If you’re unwilling to indict it

For your failure to engineer a kill switch

Or to wear a shirt

Those stingers can’t penetrate.

It’s not to blame when

The cloud of dust and dry grass

Churning through the blades

Above the evacuated rabbit hole

Transforms into a golden cloud

Of switchblades.

The sun doesn’t drop any slower

For anyone

But you

As you circle the yard

Savoring

What might be your final

Pain.

And isn’t anger like this—festering

Inside you all week until

It squeezes out through your skin

Leaving welts as it electrifies the air

Into a swarm so territorial

That you can’t—though you try to—

Outrun it?

A golden eagle landing on a midnight Trans Am.

Its big-blocked, American, eight-cylinder thunder

and lead-lined cloud of exhaust fumes mixed

with burning tire tread. That smuggler’s smile fueled

by a bootlegger’s truth: there’s public good detouring

pedantic rules. Kojak with a Kodak, choke and puke,

I got my 10 in the wind, your ass is grass and I’m gonna mow it. 

How vengeance pursued beyond reason’s jurisdiction

cuffs you to failure and ridicule. Ahead, missing bridges

only a desperado’s bravado can cross, roadblocks

evaded through the sanctuary of strangers. A wedding

in search of a bride. That you too can hitchhike from

unsatisfied’s altar when the Bandit arrives in tight jeans

with a ten-gallon lid he only removes for the one thing

he looks for in every pretty woman. And you’ll be free

if you can lose yourself in relentless movement, if you

can see carnations in the carnage of police cruisers

littering the future he cultivates in fame’s name.