Black SUV: (after Vallejo)

I will die in Houston on a Monday afternoon squashed by a giant black SUV driven by some lawyer who never really needed four-wheel drive, yapping on his cell phone when he cuts me off.

With my blood fizzing out into the street like so much sugary grape soda I will listen to him trying to reach his lawyer before the cops arrive, with their awkward questions about lines of sight and liability—

but at least I will be allowed to look up at the sky while I expire, through the twisting limbs of 100-year old oaks like a jigsaw puzzle that finally makes sense as an example of how hard life tries to extend itself.

I will die on a Monday, in Houston, in the afternoon, and I will not be happy at the indignity of being slain by a person who thinks of Bill O’Reilly as a deep thinker, a man who has never even looked for, much less found, a clitoris

but I was told some time ago that life might halt in this kind of unlikely intersection, that death might be the ultimate awkward social moment.

I suppose I can predict, when so much else frightens me, that this too, will frighten me. I suppose I will recoil from this new experience about which so many rumors have been spread,

but I hope I will be able to coax myself forward into something more comfortable than Monday afternoon, and dying, and Texas, —though, it should be said, there are worse places, too.