Folk Tales & Night Drives

I am a human until the rains pull in on the horizon,

Human until I must wade out of the reeds and taste

The ambrosia of sticky fear inside warm human blood.

I am a human until the green streetlights shift red

And catch the pinhole glint of hunger in my eyes.

.

Then I shift into something old and ancient and wicked.

My edges bleed into one another until I am a messy canvas

Of black and grey and white and all the horrors in between.

I am an eldritch god spreading long arms and howling

Into the depths of an unfathomably black, moonless night.

.

I become the black expanse between the stars above.

I become the rolling mist galloping across freeways,

Dragging my tongue across the asphalt to leave a red trail

Of someone else's soul behind me, between the white dots

Marking up the perfect black river for the sun to judge.

.

The music even believes the inception of this folktale,

Of the demon driver coaxing a human body of metal

To dance like the smoke piling off a long stick of incense

Around the curves and down the straightaways.

This is the pillow-talk of a grander web of universes.

.

The night is black, it is green, it is red like the sanguine hunger

Pooling under my tongue, making me less mortal than I was.

I am woven with the milky seminal fluid of the stars.

I am a web of everything that could be and as I tear up the road,

I remind every wide-eyed body of metal of what could be.

.

My teeth hook on the rails of old train tracks and tear them free.

I spit out the iron spikes and swallow the taste of ancient tales.

This is my night, my country, my road and nothing can dismantle

The gnawing, voracious hunger inside my belly that is turning me

Into a midnight fairy tale, a piece of folklore with glowing red eyes.