An Elegy

Carnival Red our brittle carapace charges eightlanes wide of Platzgeist Square,
                its on-board horn ejaculating in long formant wavefronts — a slur!
Galvanised in canned entropic automation
Crude, snorting obsolete injectables deep in the spider-fucking hours
                of cardboard cups and gluey eyes,
                we ride!
To the degenerate hum of auxless shock jocks’ purple jazz-poem prosody,
                the broken-up road intoning blue annotated Spiritus Mingus tone-poem basslines
Traversing timespace, our vernacular lemon barrelling for The Indestructibles
                — two bright stars we shouldn’t be able to see — its putrid engine baying
The fission of high psionic pistons heralding Mood for Solo Cacophonium
Its melodies of ill-repute, rash counterpoints clashing, thrashing in harmonic knots
                behind the backlit dash’s graphic plastic wrap.
                —
Then: A hairpin opening out! A flashbang of squealing brass and mechanical parts!
                Har-rumph!
How fast our momentum loses its moment and, um — the front-end engine stalls,
                its horsepower gone the way of gammy-legged Gabilan.
The cabin decompresses like a spit valve opened on the long trombone of night.
The hemisphere’s tallest wheel turning over the highway divider turns blue,
                green, yellow, back to red — an all-out study in fifths.
An insipid flute refrains the distant head blowing winter through a window-slit
                as our hazards tick in common time.
Silent self-directed 4x4s go wide, giving us the cold shoulder 
Lip-synching pink slip legalese like pure boilerplate scat
                —
And finally — a hacky, phthisic fit of lids and hinges.
Improvisation for its own sake
Taking the mick from the city’s rigid grid
                of arteries and autophagy,
A final act of immaculate respiration
Then: one final note (one of the ones
                we don’t play).