Ambulance

Through the smoke of summer rain’s retreat to the stars,

I saw your lights of red and white jolt. You could have been

a volcano. Vicious lava emanating red as tribes’ white

torches surrounded you in hopes that your jagged mountainsides

would not allow your smoldering innards to flow down,

unto the green leafiness, small huts, and small families

residing beneath, like corrosive dressing unto a salad.

You could have been a music show too.

Red and white lights strobing to heavy bass,

As bodies josh around in a sea of sweat and shit beer.

Where neon and glow sticks give gaze to females figures.

They assure the man can remain foolish, but they promise

that the fool remains in every human being, dancing and dazing.

Instead, you were probably a speeding meat wagon,

either carrying or going to retrieve. As we passed,

you revealed that the road was bleeding, tires sloshing

through thin liquid, on your way to complexes constructed

in squares and rectangles, colored in green, white, and red.

What passenger do you have tonight? A young girl, maybe?

Her overprotective, yet scrawny, boyfriend somewhere away

listening to ambient guitar though his headphones in his dark room,

awaiting a text from her, but instead looks out the window,

over the leafy salad forests and watches red and white fireflies

far away, dance and daze through the summer rain’s retreat to the stars.

— Alex Hawkins