Down highway 55 coming
out of Chicago
the radio plays Joe Cocker
covering a Beatles song,
my friend is struggling to
fix the cassette tape that
the player spewed out
now, a well-wrinkled, unplayable
Bowie song.
I’m watching the
telephone lines that
parallel the road
dip
and rise
pole to pole
the black lines glisten
in the moonlight
after the early fall rain.
I’m wondering
how many calls
are going through
those lines?
How many lovers
are calling
because they are
separated for one night?
How many arguments
are rattling the
copper wires?
We pass by
small towns with
odd names,
just a blink
on a highway sign.
The temperature is dropping
and we’re worried
about
black ice
and not making the concert
in Champaign.
It’s all about a girl
my buddy met
and her friends
from the sorority.
We’ll go coast to coast
to meet
girls.
There’s an accident
ahead,
we can see the
red and white lights
flashing from
a mile
away.
Cops have flares on the
road as
we pass by slowly,
turning down the
radio
to pay homage
to the crumpled cars.
No blood on the
highway,
no body parts in
plastic bags.
good signs.
We speed on
the telephone wires
dip and
rise
pole to pole
keeping up
with us the whole way.
Millions of calls
before the days
of cordless phones
before cell phones
before the over-ability
to communicate.
The Bowie tape
is ruined.
We hit the
black ice
doing about
seventy.
We spin,
bounce off a
guard rail and
careen sideways
across the
highway into the ditch,
smack-dab up against
a telephone pole.
We’d never
make Champaign
or the girls
and they would
never understand.
The phone lines
went on and on
down the highway
without us;
communicating a million
messages,
but we were
silent
not even the radio
would play.
Adding your comment:
There are very few poets I know who can write the starkness of life so bluntly yet poetically at the same time (if that makes sense) and even less that I'll take the time to read if their poems are more than a few stanzas! You have the ability to coalesce thought and reality though, and that's what makes me want to read life 
