I lose a little more of myself each night I take the wheel,
and the losing has begun to feel like the last clean thing I own.
The road unspools black and wet, and the mirror keeps offering me
the profile of a stranger who has learned to answer to my name.
Out there the market never sleeps: every mouth a pulpit, every screen a shrine,
each one hawking his private gospel and swearing it is the final word of God,
while the faithful kneel in the blue light, eyes shut and mouths hanging open,
swallowing whatever they are fed, and christening the numbness devotion.
History has run out of monsters big enough for us; the presses run all night.
A country helps itself to a country the way a guest helps himself to the wine,
no one is handed the bill, and the fist that spills the most blood is pinned with the medal.
The sky has started posting its invoices, and the famine already knows the address:
the poor first, the children first of all, buried under a guilt that no one will sign.
So I drive. Rain on the glass, the wipers marking time to the only voice
that has never once tried to sell me anything, and the dark ahead smells almost kind.
The unknown used to frighten me; these nights my own front door frightens me more,
the ten o'clock news, the neighbors baring their teeth in the shape of a smile
while the street they are standing on goes quietly under.
I want to keep losing myself, because to find myself would mean sitting down
across a table from a world that died in its sleep and forgot to tell its face.
What still passes for true tonight, and who is left holding the ruler?
We are all afloat in the same black water, and this time the water is a lie,
and the salt of the innocent has dried on our skin and it will not wash away.
So I keep the needle low on purpose and the music loud enough to drown it all,
running on fumes through a country I keep inventing, kinder than the one they willed me,
begging the road to forget how to end, praying the pale light far ahead stays far.
And here is the punchline I have been saving, the one I never say aloud:
I am no cleaner than the mouths I ran from. I built a small god out of static,
knelt in the blue glow of the dashboard, called it truth, and drove into it like all the rest.