Thus Spoke a Mad Nail on the Road

Thirty years or more I might’ve been stuck in a beam or
the corner of some homemade cubby-hole.
My own coffin.
Instead I had the naked luck to roll off
the back of some rusty pickup,
into a mightier fate.
One of chaos and disjoining.
Here I lie in wait as all these cars and trucks
pass and pass
and only touch on something native to these parts
when they stamp the pavement with the guts
of a rabbit or roebuck.
Juggernauts, every one—
till they make my acquaintance.
The right angle, the right speed and how they fall.
In an eyeblink, the road is splashed
with a shock
of rubber and broken glass.
And if I’m very lucky, the red sap
of the upright critter at the wheel:
the Lord of Velocity,
fallen prey to me, three inches
of galvanized steel.
The speeding lord gone zero to 80
to asphalt-still—
my own sweet roadkill.

***

Mahyar Afshar lives in Chicago and has worked in the (mostly unpoetical) fields of insurance and logistics. Born in Iran, he grew up in sunny Southern California, leaving him grossly unprepared for his later life on the cold steppes of the Midwest. He holds a BA in English from UC Berkeley. Find him on Twitter at @rhymesw_afshar