Race like a maniac down the highway, cutting everyone off.
Wield your SUV like a weapon,
barrel bullet-like through a red light, fail to yield the right of way at a stop sign,
speed through the placid asphalt prairies of parking lots,
drive as selfishly and monstrously as possible.
Burn as much carbon as possible in the process.
To hell with those uniformed teenage kids fighting abroad
over increasingly scarce supplies of fossil fuels.
Damn your own kids and your own grandkids
and the precarious planet they’ll inhabit.
Drive on with no end in sight, no destination in mind.
Speed and swerve like you’re the only motorist on these unfurling roads.
Don’t recognize yourself in anyone, in a single benighted soul.
You’re after all in a hurry
and they’re all a blur.
Joseph S. Pete is an award-winning journalist, an Iraq War veteran, an Indiana University graduate, a book reviewer, a photographer, the editor in chief of the Northwest Indiana Literary Journal and a frequent guest on Lakeshore Public Radio. He is a 2017 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee who has had a play staged at the Detroit Heritage Theatre Festival, who has showcased his photography at the Oddtropolis Art Show in San Fransisco, who has read his work for the Fictitious series on the iO Theater stage and who was named the poet laureate of Chicago BaconFest, a feat that Geoffrey Chaucer chump never accomplished. His literary or photographic work has appeared or is forthcoming in more than 100 journals, including Poetry Potion, The Tipton Poetry Journal, Chicago Literati, The Vignette Review, Voicemail Poems, Dogzplot, Proximity Magazine, Stoneboat, The High Window, Synesthesia Literary Journal, Steep Street Journal, Beautiful Losers, New Pop Lit, The Grief Diaries, Gravel, The Offbeat, Oddball Magazine, The Perch Magazine, The First Line, Bull Men’s Fiction, Rising Phoenix Review, Thoughtful Dog, shufPoetry, The Roaring Muse, Prairie Winds, Blue Collar Review, The Rat’s Ass Review, Euphemism, Jenny Magazine, Vending Machine Press and elsewhere. He should have gone to bio writing school to learn how to write a better bio.