there ought to be

an instruction

in the drivers’ manual

if you insist

on doing something stupid

do it fast

don’t creep

through your stupidity

increasing for the extended

period

of your stupid stupidity

the danger to everyone

else

on the road

get the derfluckenflagetta out of the way

before you kill someone,

maybe me —

and this is where this story

drifts entirely into fiction because

i almost never say ‘derfluckenflagetta'

in this situation, instead, normally,

it is a much shorter word I use,

but my old Aunt Filomena

in Little Dime Box, Texas, sometimes

reads my poems and hates Anglo-Saxons

and thinks they all ought to go back

to where they came from and would probably

waste a whole box of Depends

if she saw me use that other word

and Little Dime Box, being such a small town,

she’d have to drive all the way to Big Dime Box

to buy Depends

and she being eighty eighteen years old,

everyone else in the county hides

behind large sturdy walls

whenever Aunt Filmena hits the road,

and, so, by not using the word here

i would normally use in the actual situation

i am safeguarding the peace and tranquility

of Comanche County, Texas,

thank you very much

—so,

while true,

I want it to be a big surprise

when I die

I don’t want it to be

because I got

entangled

in someone else’s derfluckenflagetta

vehicular stupidity

(May, 2010)

Published in Goes Around, Comes Around by Allen Itz