The streets are lined with surf shops and themed restaurants
And the corpses of failed acting careers
The sun and the dirt and the pedestrians’ hair are all sink-rust orange
I try reading from the passenger side, but it induces a headache
So I play with the automatic window, leaving just enough of a crack
To hear the wind whistling a C.
I whistle a G, harmonize an empty fifth.
A power chord, you called it, with a certain reverence
For its imperfect beauty,
Completely content with the emptiness

I’ve driven this road so many times
Once with you, even. Singing along to Social Distortion
Only half-believing the over simplified lyrics:
“Life goes by so fast.”
I wonder if Mike Ness earned that cliché.
You did.

I doubt you’d care. You’d just shake
Your wrist to allow your bracelet to fall
And skip around to the tracks that mean something
To you.

But now the dial is cold
And the people out the window are oblivious
Running along the beach automatically,
With headphones stuck in their ears, wearing turquoise spandex.
And shirts, the term applied here in the loosest of the sense.
All contraptions in unison, bobbing up and down like muppets.

There’s a beauty to the machinery of it all. The cars swerving
Cutting, slashing, carving—their bucket seats full of sand,
Their drivers’ minds still on surfboards
In the glass-cleaner blue ocean.
The clean glass houses to the east,
That you once insisted “No one actually lives in.
They were just built to make poor people jealous.”
Maybe it was to make them believe in their dreams.
The dreams that are nestled within the darkness of the road,
Painted over with a thick black tar.
The dreams suffocating beneath my tires.