Flat Tire Blues

My need to assert my masculinity
(which I guess is a thing for women too)
got me in trouble today
with a Mack truck.
I didn’t count its wheels,
but I can tell you

that there were many.
The impact was soft,

low speed,
but depressing,
my tire cut into slices
like a salami,
my mirror decapitated,
a long white scratch along
the poor gray body of my trusty station wagon.
I should have slowed down,
“yielded” as they say.
But I let the voices in my head
spur me forward.
“You’re no one’s fool!”
they cried, gnashing their teeth.
“That truck wouldn’t dare!
Seize the road!  Seize it!”
But the truck dared,
and so I skulked to the side of I-45,
watching the snarls of traffic
(which my swashbuckling had created) build,

until cars blanketed the highway for miles behind me.
Hunched low in my front seat,
I waited for the police
and for the wrecker
to tow my bruised car
and my bruised ego
six miles to the tire shop
for partial repairs.

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