morning is seditious; the alphabet’s a void is nothing without the accomplice of my window where the air breaks into seasons, hour after hour the city grows younger. a portrait of strangers swooning over whiskey, revolutionizing poetry, invent music, transport themselves to a time that didn’t yet exist. themselves, invent the lore of cassette tapes, dimestore jeans & the secret lives of headlights. (you know the kind, self-enlightened, without myth or desire.) but fools need love, too & the vertigo of neckties angry barbed wire shoelaces petrified, now ground to dust there’s no real movement, after all, no procession from meaning to meaning–that’s where our feet got it wrong—we’re the prisoners of mood men & manic giants. but most of all, of someone else’s laughter. have we crossed the threshold yet & where exactly do we belong? (smoke drifts through abandoned windows) a lonely mass of invertebrate stars, an eye half-blinking, not awake, not yet falling: hardly ever reflecting the moon & the company it keeps.
Secret Lives of Headlights
The Used Life 
19 responses to “Secret Lives of Headlights”
It’s a feast, and I like sampling lines, then returning to taste them again. Maybe crave a few later on. The invertebrate smoke as stars, and the vertigo necktie. Headlights aren’t on much around here at night anymore, but I still wish to learn their secrets.
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Thank you very much. I’m happy you’ve read and reread some of these lines. To be sure, headlights have a most unusual view of the world.
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Aces!
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Thanks, Nick!
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There are so many great lines and images here. Especially the third stanza.
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Thank you so much. I’m happy you enjoyed it.
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This poem has such a cool vibe. I lost myself in your words. I was transported to the time that does not yet exist, as you mentioned.
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Thank you so much! I’m glad you enjoyed the vibe 😎
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J’ai beaucoup aimé cette lecture sous forme de poésie-omnibus (ou poésie en mouvement, pour le dire avec élégance) qui renouvelle et élargit les mécanismes des significations successives, une architecture poétique sans cesse démêlée et refaite en perpétuel rotation. C’est une présentation très originale de ce beau poème. L’illustration qui l’accompagne est également fantastique. Bravo! 🙂
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Thank you; although, I have to be honest, I think the formatting may have been incorrect (or not as I wanted it) when you read this…Regardless, glad you liked it.
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You’re welcome… J’aime tout ce que vous écrivez.
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Well, I thank you for drawing my attention to the change in formatting–more of a happy accident, really. Now that I’ve played around with it, I think I like the poem better in a single block. Thanks again for the feedback, though I can’t take credit for the originality in presentation. 🙂
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Originality is innate in you. 🙂
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It seems that you are unable to write something that I don’t absolutely love :)…again, well done. I love that I have to revisit and reread your work in order to fully pull all that I can from it. Your lines provide the reader the words that give beautiful expression of what this life may be…its complexity as well as its simplicity found in your poetry…”that’s where our feet got it wrong”…all of us treading our paths, plodding away at things that we think will bring us closer to meaning, to God, to a firm footing as we tumble. Perhaps an “eye half-blinking” is the only glimpse we will have…and so I will take the words of a poet to soothe a mind that will never stop wondering at it all…
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Thank you so much, my friend. Your comment brought a big smile to my face. Poetry has a remarkable power, I think, to both soothe our souls and keep us contemplating, wondering, marveling at the mysteries that surround us. I am delighted you found meaning in this poem. 🙂
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Hi, I haven’t been here much recently. You know how it is with this virus-avoiding locked in/down or up, tricky to be ‘normal’. Anyway, I’m glad to find that your words, now I’m here, still strike me as ‘of course, *those* words together make beautiful musical and lyrical pictures… how does she do that?’ 😉
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I have noticed you haven’t been around. And I understand. This lockdown business through me off for awhile too. But I am delighted you’re here, and I thank you for the wonderful compliments. ☺️
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Interesting — I just listened to an article on CBC Radio about headlights — it was all about how some headlights appear brighter than others when it’s actually how their focused versus their brightness. And, how we never see our own headlights because we’re always following them, so we never know if we’re unfocused.
Your sensuous poetry reminded me of following unfocused headlights.
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I like that! Thank you for sharing, Louise. I think you’ve just added another layer of meaning to the metaphor of the headlight. 🙂
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