Poetry
Cruising Down 69
By Parker Galloway
The tires rumble down the sun-baked asphalt of the highway.
Barren and desolate just like the minds of the general populace of this “great” nation that I happen to find myself dwelling in.
What is this madness that I seem to be the only one to see?
Everyone pretends that the end isn’t just down the boulevard.
Goddamn, I can’t see left or right, future or pass,
nothing can pierce through this vile fog
that has lain itself across the land
like a fat piggish whore in a cheap Texan brothel five miles from the border.
Borders, what are borders but imaginary lines on a map
drawn by men being paid by other men to draw the lines where they want them.
If one man can draw lines on a map,
why can’t all men draw these same lines from their souls to their desires?
My desires died years ago, ice in the sand.
Melted away in the heat that forged the mindset of the lost and road-bound.
How can God inflict exile on man,
once they find out that the real Jerusalem is out here among the drifters and hermits?
Addicts and drunkards, fiends and whores.
The wretched hive of debauchery,
a feeling of peace and calm in the chaos that washes away all feelings of stress.
Lose yourself in the sand-blown hovels of the deserters and traitors
then awake and leave this place for the next foreign land.
But what is this promised land but a rumor from the lips of these lies and cheats, beggars and squatters.
How can one trust the corrupted and damned?
Just don’t trust at all but travel ever onward, never settling down.
Only the roads hold safety, that safety is in movement.
Always on the move, to stop is to give up and lay down and die like a stuck pig.
Live free and eternal, in this mad-max parody in the 21st century
no water wars only the Grass Wars and the High Times.
Forget me not under this sun-scorched rock.
I am Parker Galloway, a 17 year old poet from Clinton, Mississippi. I like to write about darker topics or at least that’s what comes out of my pen when I write. I usually don’t plan my poems ahead of time. It’s all in the matter of minutes that the rough drafts are usually written. Then I go and correct them.
“Cruising Down 69” is a more rebellious take on American life and I think it really highlights my dissatisfaction with the way things are going in our country right now. Thank you in advance for reading it.
