By Colin Dodds
Spill-O’s destination is a rueful interruption
after hours in a church whose confessional is a driver’s seat
and whose altar is the distance
The crack of the rental car’s plastic bumper
kicks the thrust-and-parry recriminations
of the jagged karmic wheel into motion
He chooses not to think about it
Choosing not to think about it is how he got here,
and possibly the only way to keep going
Spill-O smiles with gritted teeth
and explains the condition of the car
into a courtesy phone
It’s a tale of recklessness and fecklessness,
calamity, duplicity and apathy, of a lazy cover-up
and its unsurprising discovery
The phone woman has heard Spill-O’s tale all before
He can hear her eyelids kiss shut in disappointment
as he turns again from the truth
He takes the pills and chooses not to think
about how even the most lighthearted pilgrimage
seems to unearth so many glaring moral failures
And at the airport’s tens-a-barrier ribbon,
Spill-O becomes a slightly worse person
each time the line folds onto itself
Colin Dodds grew up in Massachusetts and completed his education in New York City. His poetry has appeared in more than a hundred and seventy publications and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He is also the author of several novels, including WINDFALL and The Last Bad Job, which the late Norman Mailer touted as showing “something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.” And his screenplay, Refreshment, was named a semi-finalist in the 2010 American Zoetrope Contest. Colin lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Samantha. You can find more of his work at thecolindodds.com
