I Drive With Ghosts

I drive with ghosts,
Slicing through the night's fog
Like the knife blade of civilization:
Smooth, cool, inexorable;
Antiseptic, artificial, unmarred
By organic imperfection.

I shatter the silence with my
Petrochemical fury,
A missile on a mission,
Bound for oblivion and unstoppable.

Here, in the hinterlands,
Beneath the alien radar and the
Notice of the five percent,
Given over to the domains of darker
Overlords,

On the event horizon,
Where darkness annihilates light,
Turning it into x-ray cascades,
Cathode ray nightmares,
Cancers in the making,

I glide through the night in my
Sleek two ton bullet,
All electronics and fiberglass,
Mocking the Universe's lackadaise.

And out here, on the fringes
Of the concrete fungus,
The overgrown byproduct of the love of artifice,
I touch infinities unthought of
In the chambers of science,
Unheard of by the cognescenti,
The think tanks, the Bell Labs,

Lucent and ethereal,
And ancient, but awash in continuous renewal,
A breakneck standstill,
The breath of God, or gods, unnamed.

I dance on the verge of vastness
And let it watch my progress,
Untouched, unmoved, unwelcome,
Winding my way through like
An eyelash on the rim of the eye
Of history.

Later, within the eye of the night,
Unbounded and isolated,
I reach an arbitrary shore,
A signpost that is perhaps
A comunal hallucination.
I return from the beast's bowels;
I emerge into the world.

But the anticlimax only serves
To remind me of where I've been.
The night swallows and digests me
And returns me transformed,
Its trace elements still within me.
I drive with ghosts.