living to be a quarter- century

We wander down backways often, speeding out of ignorance
towards an a address we only half remember.
Something with a six in it, we agree.
There's an anxiety in our tremulous bellies
like report card day or touching down after turbulence. We
outpace it. We call that Progress. We turn up
the radio and down the windows,
we forget we don't know don't know where we're going.
A quarter is half buried in tobacco shavings and fry crumbs,
warm from the ass pressing it into the charcoal fabric.
It has ridden these old roads before,
Slid and bounced around their curves and potholes,
etched memories into itself, compiling annals;
It has internalized this scarred history, become rugged.
We dig it from the seat cushion and flip it.

A quarter's swan song is singing,
undulating on the granite, is ringing;
I chug a keystone heavy, eyeball it's mathematical decay.
Eerie above the chants and jeering flit the overtones.
The empty harmonics echo and qwaver at the edge of perception--
the terror of knowing my mind's to weak to harvest the fear and
my liver too mortal to filter it.
I slap the coin into my palm and chuck it out the window.

You reel and titter in the hallway, maybe hoping to echolocate,
the way you read once on an eastern healing blog,
maybe hoping, like me, to discern a pattern from the chaos.
An ancient beetle twitches its vestigial wing.
You can't make sense of the image, commit to consider,
 tomorrow, the past's effect on the present. You never get around to it.