Poem #1 From the Book of the Fearless Age of the American Automobile
Kenneth DiMaggio
As only delinquents
with a bad ass car like
GTO would know
—a journey which began
with a case of Narragansett
or Rolling Rock beer
in the trunk
—an illegality
you managed to by-pass
because your old man
was in good
with the proprietor
of The Lucky
Horse Show
Bar & Grill
(whose neon U-shaped sign stopped blinking
the day the first Cat’lick President died)
Such was the local
legend
one told too many times
by men whose legend-making days
died somewhere on a Philippines
navy base twenty years ago
it
was time to ride our car
as delinquents
who learned how to sex up sedans
into hot rods at Trade School
and as bad girls
who put some devil into their
parochial
by hiking up uniformed plaid
to show the dangerous curve
in a thigh
and by putting enough black
crayon to give themselves dark
Beatnik Cleopatra eyes
And with enough power
of four hundred or more
wild and un-corral-able horses
under the hood
we were ready to go
and to the only place
where we could be
the basketball size flat top
of a crooked Irish crossed
hilly cemetery
and with 24 long neck
bottles
and an auto battery
that would let us play FM wah-wah and
wailing rock ‘ n roll all night
that would not be over
until three outlaw
trade school boys
and three religiously tempting
Beatnik-eyed girls
climbed on top
of the hood
and in a space
too small for our Converse or biker-booted
hugged and held
swayed
and rolled
because
if any one of us let go
—but we didn’t
And never would we, is what we promised
as only teenage factory town fugitives
with a bad ass future
at least until it was time
to go back to their world
and make more trouble
from the way we could still not shed our innocence