don’t have any visual aids
Or tactile aids
No olfactory aids
I flew here
After some detours
I saw Bruce Springsteen
At the Weisman Museum
In all his cars on all those lonely roads

What would we have done without the car radio?
You were with me in the car
People sometimes tell me I pulled over
Until they were done you made my cry
Or laugh you pissed me off
And I wasn’t even singing
I am glad I kept you company
My voice has been inside a lot of cars
I am embarassed Who knows
What you were really doing?
Not as much as listening to Bruce, I’m sure.

I got here in a thousand cars
I made a movie about a car
A red Cadillac talked with my voice
I channeled it
Humans without cars are sick
The Martian observers said
Snails that lost their shells
All my Romanian friends are sick
Eighty percent of the world is sick
But they are sick together

When a song makes them amorous or lonely
There is no place they can go to immediately

I was once small and scared in my father’s
Black Packard in the 1950s
Everyone was afraid of my father
Because my father had a car
I was scared because there was
Someone else in the car with us
Sometimes there were five or ten
Other people in the car with us
They were invisible and I was very small
Those people, said someone who hated my father,
Are the men he has arrested
Their shadows stayed behind
I could always see them

For many years I forgot about them

Then I became the Perfect Passenger
The Twin in the Womb
The Twin of the Perfect Driver
Neal Cassidy’s brother
Well, that was Jack Kerouac actually
He was always Neal Perfect Passenger

But this is not about me
It’s about something a lot scarier

Something without eyes
Something without hands
Something without a nose
Indeed something without a body
Rides inside your car
It’s the Invisible Passenger

The Consummate Passenger
The Perfect Invisible Hitchhiker
You don’t remember you stoppped for
In nineteen-sixty something
He’s been in your car ever since
In all your cars ever since
Every one of your cars the nicer
Roomier snazzier cars riding up
Through the decades like your income
Or down it doesn’t matter
He doesn’t care
You gave him a ride and he will
Be with you forever

What hasn’t he seen
What hasn’t he heard
What hasn’t he felt
What hasn’he sniffed
What hasn’t he licked
Everything

He is not alone
There is also a blind man in your car
With an exaggeratedly sensitive skin
And a deaf guy who sniffs everything
Anda deaf blind guy who hears very well
And a guy who is mostly tongue

You picked them all up hitchhiking
In nineteen sixty or ninety seventy something
And they’ve been in your car ever since
In all your cars ever since
And they are not the only ones there are more
Specialized pale beings picked up by your grandfather
Or grandmother and then by your father and mother

In nineteen forty fifty sixty seventy or something
Who rode in their cars until your folks died or got too old
To drive anymore and then they moved into your car
All your cars and are now in there every time you take the wheel

They are the Perfect Passengers
The Consummate Passengers

And they’ve never spilled anything
They’ve never said anything
They’ve never interfered in your domestic squabbles
They said nothing when you were mean to your children
They didn’t laugh when you cried
They didn’t care when you farted or jacked off
They never questioned where you were going
They just rode along and fed on everything
With the one sense that made the most sense
Which is why they live long very long
Long enough to outlive you and move
Into your children and your grandchildren’s cars
The Consummate Passengers

One of them feels through the fabrics of the past
There is more there rolls and rolls of natural and synthetic
Covers for much forgotten interior
Another records things said inside the car
One of those things said inside a car
That can only be said inside a car
We are collecting an anthology
Of things said inside a car
That can only be said inside a car
It is called Things Said Inside a Car

I told you not to
I told you so
What is that supposed to mean
What’s her/his name anyway
If I wasn’t going to do this I would
This very minute
I didn’t have anything to do with it
They made me do it
That’s my business
If they don’t shut up right now I’ll have to do something
Go ahead and kill me
Do you want to get out right here Go ahead
Can you touch that a little
Not on your life buster
Can’t you see how pretty it is?
It’s not real money
What are you looking at you’ll get us killed
They are your children too

And he hangs a story on each of these things
And the anthology keeps getting huge
Nobody’s going to publish it
Not even a literary press

Years pass everything is recorded

Oh velour
Oh Chrisler Cordoba Corinthian leather
Oh Japanese limo with swimming pool
Oh Letterman aftermath limo!
Oh sadness and horror of all the Invisible Passengers in the car!
For me the best thing is getting out at the light
But I will always ride I will never get out at the light
I can no longer live in pedestrian countries

I am permanently strapped in the baby seat
With all those people around me
Mom and Dad can’t see them
Maybe they saw them once when they made me in the back seat
That was my double womb conception
God didn’t throw them out of the car
I was the only one driven from paradise
When I grow up I will re-enact my conception
The future is a series of better and better furnished wombs
Eventually we will not need to leave our cars at all
We will be in paradise and we will be one with glass
Chrome and nauga
Look the Martians will say They have cured themselves