Arnie Waiters

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Arnie Waiters died with his secret.
Screeches shattered the silence,
a wailing, phantom and strident
and a hiss like water leaking
out of cracked pipes. Maybe
two, and maybe the people
with their red jackets, fighting
wintertime, saw a crackling bonfire.
a fireworks show.

Survey the scene.
And four wheels were still
four but the eighteen was
sixteen and two, and the snow
went black from the tar in the tank
like an oil-spill ocean
in the intersection.
And my friend Stan
is saying he saw the whole thing

No Lies No **** Honest To God
No Exaggeration.
Finger on the button on the pole
on the sidewalk
Stan saw Arnie Waiters’ brakes
lock up. Saw him jump
past that burning red light
that looming beacon,
into the intersection.

And the eighteen-wheel tanker was a ship
lost at sea slamming its horn
looking for lighthouses.
And No Joke No Duplicity
he saw Arnie Waiters’ face.
Eyes like snowballs with veins
and his mouth just a little agape
a tiny black hole,
an impossible singularity.

And that’s when the twisted metal squirmed,
writhed right through Arnie Waiters’
big intestine and his waist.
You could blink and miss it
but his legs sat still, unquivering
in the seat of the car
and the tar spilled pitch black
like lifeless magma
in the intersection.

Gather. Get perspective.
With the white of the snow
and the black of the tar
there sat a twisted-up
yin-yang, and in the center of the
black was Arnie Waiters’ other half.
And Stan stood there.
Sole Crowd Sole Witness before the mass
that day in the intersection.

And that perhaps made-up secret
that Arnie Waiters said he held,
but that he would never tell
that was So Surreptitious So Scandalous
that had bought him a week
or two of popularity
with the cool kids at the highschool
well, that secret
was dead just like Arnie Waiters.

Keep your feet still. Hands frozen.
That blue-gray sky above the
shrapnel of cars and of Arnie Waiters
got me thinking how everything
is just burning metal after time.
And I speak my soul
in whispers into a balloon
with helium inside and when I
let go,

It’s gonna be a color far
away, and then disappear
and be a little drop of blood
on God’s Endless Kitchen Floor
made of big white tiles,
and it’s funny: Here we are like
Ozymandias and Nebuchadnezzar,
building ant hills.
and laughing at the History Channel.