same title challenge: Travelling the Tarmac

todski28

Literotica Guru
Joined
Aug 8, 2012
Posts
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So December rolls around again, another year punched in on the time card of life, and I started thinking on all the journeys that you go on, surely there has to be something poetic in all of it, wether it be a real road trip, a metaphorical road where you get metaphorical road rash pen it.

no from requirements, no length restriction just sit at the keyboard and travel the tarmac windows down wind in your hair and show us all what it was like.
try and have it finished by the end of December, since it's holiday season and things go crazy hopefully a month to write gives you enough time if not it's only lit :D
 
Travelling The Tarmac

Have to hit the road, flee
in that moment a flash
of glinting steell a pale throat
begging to be opened
set blood free to mingle
with the cross
hatching of tiles over
a laugh in jest
the last laugh a clatter of metal
thrown as I see me
reflected in the glinting
gleam of his eyes

feet echo out a transient beat
dull thuds
trees breathe in this state
of being I laugh at the wonder
I discover leaping

thoughts trickle and flood
ebbing flows in blood
streaming synapse fire
moons eye is shattered
then recreated in a thousand
waves

teleported time distorted
illusioned stupor
Tarmac gives way to dream
time
owl sized eyes see clear
as day in black a cactus stalk
sways waves me forward
race to the cliff face
trail narrows to a foot wide
on either side perilous
death in misted breath
I laugh at being mortal
taste it on the wind

that threatens to upend
my travelling feet
stamping to a perilous
beat

On the road again time
bends
skin grainy
dirty
gritty
crusted in salt painted
streaks of black, brown
and red
head bowed at my faults
tumultuous thoughts
shoes filled with blistered
blood

Foot falls crunch
day light burns
somewhere I fell
somewhere I caught
myself
 
road kill (a blast from the past)

I do much of my thinking whilst driving
killing the dead time between here and there
between two points on a map
between her and me
she has kinks! where a man yearns
for a woman to have kinks

if she was a road
my car couldn't handle her
a driver, has to apply skill
feel the camber of her curves
feel the car's chassis stress on her bends
feel the springs give on her brow
it's a long road between love and hate
and there are too many accidents
stalking blind junctions

too many ambitions to be thwarted
too much passion misspent
I felt the road pass beneath me
felt my tyres screech
on an unsuspected bend
dodging an oncoming truck
hogging the road

I start to count the dead on this short journey
two hedgehogs and a fox
a flattened rabbit
and a smashed crow!
 
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cars (another blast from the past)

you choose your car
like you choose your lover
(Dominique began her weird French discourse)
not necessarily the most beautiful
nor the fastest
it could be a little dated
with the springs a little stiff!
but it's the overall package
the kudos of having something "autre"

Angelique insisted on the Mini
(insisting it was possible)
pull your knees up into your chest
let his head press into the hook of your neck
his deep breaths sweat your breasts
the whole tangled choreography is at a juncture, she said
that allowed him deepest penetration

Francois scoffed and pointed to the Deux Cheveaux
forget its sewing machine engine
it has springs to die for!
open the sunroof she explained
stand up and feel the warm summer air
drifting in off the Atlantic
he comes up at you
primal and hungry
the car maybe static but boy!
your mind is doing the ton!

if a man's car is an extension of his penis
continued Dominique
is it fair to say the way he drives
is probably how he fucks?
Angelique intervened
"Is the way a woman drives the way she fucks?"
I looked up at Dominique in amazement
remembering how she drove me back from Vannes to St Pierre
surging down the back lanes
swinging into one bend and skidding out of another
riding the dips and brows like she was riding a bronco
a battered old red Renault 4 with a deceptively spacious interior!


epilogue

I saw Dominique some years later
leaving a restaurant off Pont Neuilly
she had lost her youthful jaunt
that fresh roundness had gone
she was more angular
like she was guarding her weight too zealously
she stepped in to a Mercedes that was waiting
with the cold charm of a sophisticate
you don't have young eager sex in a Mercedes
you don't even make love
you make a deal
Dominique looked like someone
who had made a deal!
 
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AMT (yet another blast from the past)

she drove to the AMT
without protection
money
that age old seat wetter
almost as old as whoring
whether she was sat on her excitement
or the thrill was in the itch
she felt in the palm of her hand
every woman her price
every degenerate has his masterstroke
I want her car impounded
for sexual forensics!
 
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Thanks for the contributions bogus, curious as to why you don't think you could write them now?
 
Thanks for the contributions bogus, curious as to why you don't think you could write them now?

They were all written at a time when for some reason I was really interested "road poems" for want of a better term and I was actually was doing a lot of actual driving round Europe for one reason or another. I had a job in England, a house in France and a wife and daughter in Holland.

These are two poems written in the same period

new wave

bank holiday and the roads are clear
cruising down Parkway
my mind in neutral, the car in fifth
this is how films begin
setting the scene

will our hero turn left instead of right
prompting a celluloid journey to unroll
before the grubby vistas of Sheffield
a stark social realism
pressed beneath granite skies

I return to eye the road's empty zoom
the unwinding of tarmac
cutting through the years of strife
the neglect scarred landscape
the inadequate new

the past is the past is the present
angry young men will always be angry
nothing changes here
you are stamped, priced and labelled
owned by government bureaucracy

TV, beer and occasional sex
the thought of summer and maybe, the Med
you know you’ll take yourself, catch up
with yourself coming back, trapped
this place has too much gravity

even the lardy blur who sprints
headlong across the carriageway
throws up no surprise, just some lover
escaping a husband's wrath
or some lunatic fleeing this life

sanity sprouting in his head
for the first time in years, on hearing
the birds sing, shed his bed covers
and made for a scrub of bushes
I U-turned, the road back, the road ahead


interlude

two amber eyes hung on the horizon
wavering, then swooping down along the tarmac
exploding and scorching the hedgerows with light
before leaving a trail of two red glows
fading fast in my rear view mirror

on the edge and this is why I'm here
taking a break to stretch my compacted ache
amongst the woods and fields that bank this road
full of the sounds of uneasy survival
an idyll the night fills with a quiet savagery

under the moon that balloons across the sky
where nightlife shuffles nervously in the verges
as an owl kites a silent shadow across its path
dropping cruel fate with flexing talons
pivots it's eyeballed head and unfolds into flight

dissolving ghostly into the darkness
as I am washed in the beams of passing headlights
spectres illuminated in the hedgerows
a twilight world of lost youths struggling home
forever suspended in the briefness of passing headlights

from a lay-by on a lonely road from Poitiers to Nantes
I observe these passing lives like lost astronauts
floating through the black enormity of space
and think of the people I have met or not
but passed me on a lonely road through France

fidgeting the car into gear I end this interlude
winding onto the road and through an avenue of trees
that bends into a tunnel I flood with my headlights
cutting a tract of road escaping into the dark
passing and being passed and passing
 
Yet another!:eek:

The road out of here

the bus belched and farted up the hill
it's severe effort almost blowing a gasket
as it dug deep and searched for that lower gear
to haul itself up and over the brow

I joined its struggle and stoically absorbed its discomfort
its suspension tested down the other side
into the shadow of the alpine heap
where the headgear stood

solemn as a gallows, dominating the pit yard
we would sidle across the cobbled expanse
drawing in deeply, we would search for that elusive hit
of that final cigarette, before grinding its tab into the dirt

then propping a leg against the wall
someone would heave open the heavy steel doors
through which we would shuffle, like the condemned
muttering, there has to be another way

I turn to face ahead, years down the road
there must other ways out of this town
other routes that don't involve this arduous task
other ways of leaving that don't include dying
 
When I get some actual time bogus I'll throw out some proper thoughts other than these are great :D

there is so much going on in all of them they need to be read a lot and savoured properly. not that my opinion means much sine I have the ability and mentality of a spastic orang-utan, work is beating me into an early grave at the minute.
 
every time i feel close to beginning, i read the pieces here and end up farther away than when i started. some truly cracking writes here already! *lost in admiration*
 
The problem with highways
is the leaving, black ribbons
flutter past refineries billboards

Jesus saving scarlet lipped faces
that promise song wine fortune
arrows shot through a neighborhood

of transience the same blue truck
turning up over and over three
cars back then two ahead until

we all veer yawning into empty
sky and land painted with water tower
murals, apples big as boulders or

a message--welcome to somewhere
we'll pass in five minutes. The blue
truck takes an exit at Blacksburg but

we travel on climbing the mountains
thinking of refuge and the home
we'll build when we find it.
 
Thanks for the addition Angeline :) solid write thoughts to come when I have time.
 
Thanks for the addition Angeline :) solid write thoughts to come when I have time.

You're welcome. I don't think my poem is quite done but I wanted to get it down and see how I feel about it in a few days.

This thread is a great idea, great challenge title. Your poem is really good. I might cut it back a little bit (just a little), but if you can do that you should submit it to be published somewhere. It has a lot of potential and is almost there imho.
 
Dumb Luck.

It is your fault,
that stubborn streak
which finds us stranded
on Christmas Eve
in Muskoka, knee deep
in French patois and on
alien roads. They may
look familiar, that ribbon
of central white and
the sentinel telegraph poles
but the radio blast is
unfamiliar and the signs
scrambled. Frozen fields
of spikey stubble blown free
of snow, bird dotted, give up their
meagre left-overs reluctantly.

You stand, foolishly hopeful
while I sulk, mulishly doleful
knowing no-one will "be along
soon" in the winter gloom. And
yet, over the crest, headlights.
 
Travelling The Tarmac

A year is eight thousand seven hundred sixty
hours and that's only one of the thirty-four
together, and you thought to end it
in one instant of one moment of one hour
in one day and it all came down to
three hours on that one hundred and eighty
mile stretch of a road leading to nowhere
but which returns to sanity and salvation.
Where else could it lead when the only
way back is to roll forward into hell
then acceptance, then across the river
into normal? How did normal end
with a run down Highway 28 right back
to where we both began almost one hundred
thousand trip-hours ago? Normal begins
with each breath drawn and exhaled
and each yard of tarmac driven away
from here to back where we belong.
 
so much good stuff here. *sighs*

i keep meaning to start, keep contemplating what might be the path to take. my mind keeps sliding away, avoiding it. guess it'll come when it's ready and probably take an unexpected detour anyway. :rolleyes:
 
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