When You’re Seventeen Everything Sounds like a Secret Anthem to Doom
Death is everywhere. There are flies on the windscreen.
—Depeche Mode
And the sea’s grief swings its heavy fringe forth
each time you bend over in silver sequins, or a boy howls out
the moonroof of a borrowed Nissan Maxima. Blood surges.
Blast the synth. Take the dark, twisty roads fast. Flick off
the headlights deep in the sticks. Take long swigs
of cinnamon liquor, soar past the graveyard—
hands off the wheel, feet off the floorboard.
Don’t make too much meaning of the fact
Depeche Mode is playing each time you
should but do not die.
Listen: There’s a kind of drunk boy who will jerk
the wheel on a slick road on purpose, because you
can’t sing the Right Words.
The night it ices over, for instance—
trees spangled in crystalline Love Code:
late page lit match Let’s have
a line of blow a black celebration—
Even as you crash through the guardrail he will swear he is joking.
A slice of you will always be caught in the dead
air of this joke.
Will always be forked in this creek: headlights cracking
the ice crust, glowing the river stones. Always the same
rap on the glass with a fat Maglite, and the way
he wheedles the police, wild-eyed.
Of course he becomes a coke dealer who joins the Navy. You even live
long enough to buy him a model Porsche from Sharper Image.
You ghost him in college.
What did you expect?
The part where Death oozes up his spiral staircase to claim you as Bride?
Who were you anyway? I mean to crash into an icy river & walk away.
Do it. Slip the memory all the way up your arm like an opera glove
& through the glass of a plummeting Maxima. Reach out & touch
the cold down of Doom’s Cheek. Hear his huge horse snort.
Attend to the warm wound of Dave Gahan’s voice.
Make sense of a single black feather smothered in snow.
