But I’m the hero when I tell it

“A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted”

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

My high beams fracture
the night’s natural order.
A black cat materializes
around unidentified glowing objects
Frozen in the street
My headlights
Jolt its retreat back across the road.

My own eyes,
scanning for other strays,
lock in on a stoic coyote
at the end of the cat’s
disrupted trajectory.

As it looks into the car,
it’s stare says everything:

I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.
That’s my dinner
sliding off its plate.
Who are you,
ambivalent god,
behind windshield safety,
manipulating my fate?
I live naked in the world you create.
Pushed to the shoulder,
hunger growing harder
to satiate.
I’m not asking for handouts,
just let me eat my keep
and I’ll stay on the margins,
work while you sleep.
I notice you sit comfortably,
a bag of tacos on your seat.
One is paneer
the other, pork belly.
Does anything steer
your soulless morality,
except raw appetite?
I’m scrapping to survive
your creeping concrete blight.
And yet I’m the one
you think is deserving of spite?
Because I dare hunt a creature
you long stripped of instinct,
tonight?
This world is fresh out
of what you would call
fair fights…

Another agent of chance
shatters our gaze
from the oncoming lane,

The shadow of the coyote swirls
into the black ink of night.

Another car
ruining another moment.

My tacos were starting to get cold anyway

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