Imagine the

i. Imagine the sincerity in a voice that is not the poet's the familiar in a form that is not the body of the poet's work & the mystery of the word not yet undressed. Or imagine the danger of riding with a stranger, a hitchhiker, who suddenly in an excited state puts a pistol to your head & confesses to murdering another already & putting the body in Dale Hollow Lake & imagine how it must have been for the hitchhiker never being able to get those dead eyes out of his mind & imagine remaining calm thinking rather than feeling as poets are guilty of. Imagine putting the pedal to the medal & when the voice states flatly: "I could kill you, too," imagine your own calm voice responding: "and yourself in this crash." & imagine the silence broken by the cocking of the pistol against your head & the roar of a V-8 Chevy. & try to imagine the sound a window makes rolling down quick crank after quick crank & most of all imagine the sound of a .38 fired into the air outside the car into darkness. Then imagine a couple just past Spring Creek bridge who will never know what noise it was that woke them one balmy night in late August. Written January 10th, 2002 © on Jan 10 2002 10:35 AM PST, Rudy Thomas   0 • 10