Driving Into the Fire

Artwork by Eugenia Loli

She was a blonde astrologist

Back in the fifties,

Jaded by a feminist mother

And the townsfolk

Who called her a ‘witch,’

She took tarot-reading appointments

And hung out with the ‘cool kids’

Who threw back Jack

And smoked pot-laced cigarettes

In the back halls of town dances,

Wishing they could live

Like Kerouac and Ginsberg.

He was a magician

In a traveling freak show,

A child from the backstreets

Near the Coney Island carnival.

His father was a womanizing drunk,

His mother died giving birth.

He lived a childhood-full

Of Peter pan and stale toast,

Creaming his bad memories

Into a paste that held his heart together.

He loved the work of Poe,

The fast cars he rode in with rich friends.

They came together one night,

chance meeting at a train station

Somewhere past Memphis.

She’d stolen her best friends

Red Barbie convertible,

And he was tired of being paid

For lying to the dirty faces

Of kids who couldn’t afford

‘the real thing.’

So they stole out of town,

New love blazing as strange

As a new morning turned pink

As the tulip stars

In a town just west of Jupiter.

And laughing like

Wild flower children of the sixties,

They drove straight into the inferno.

Written for a prompt at Margo Roby's Wordgathering.