My Every Pining Mushaira
When I was 15 I got my driver’s permit and seceded from The Union of my Childhood
When I was 16 I got my driver’s license, and became an independent, warring nation,
Rightly decimated at smoking battles on those Mason-Dixon meadows of becoming a better man
I drove all over America in those jalopies “The Li’l Boy In The Blue Hat”,
An automatic white Honda Accord, and “Li’l Hegel”, a manual silver Plymouth Neon,
In whose driver’s seat I felt myself to be a polylimbed Durga, rightfooting gas & brake,
Leftfooting clutch, righthanding driving wheel, lefthanding gear shift, shifting eyes,
From road to rearview mirror, to side mirrors, and back to the road, again and again,
And in whose backseat one balmy Lorton night I guitar’d and belted out
My impromptu chorded & lyric’d ‘personal hit’ “Redemption---Not Revolt”
Recorded for posterity on an old tape recorder, its lone copy surviving unknown in my laptop
Through 14 years of travel, much by unicycle, literally around the world, Asia & Middle East
Uploaded finally along with a video clip of my old “band photos” to Youtube ,17 years later
I became a chauffeur for high school goths, emo kids, and even outright outcasts like me,
We were called friends, but we were chauffeur and client, paying with strange social tokens
I became a pizza delivery boy, Durga-ing, drifting, shifting, rocking The Mars Volta and The Velvet Teen,
Finger-tracing that dog-eared Northern Virginia map, hot pizza essence impregnating the upholstery,
I delivered those pizzas toppinged in random configurations of pepperoni, onions, jalapenos, olives,
& pineapple placed in sauce, cheese, spice, and dough, like an ancient Mesopotamian messenger
Courieing clay tablets of cuneiform accounts in like configurations of reed stylus wedge-marking
Pottered slabs
After 60 countries, bussed, boated, planed, walked, penny-farthinged, unicycled, horsebacked, an accomplished anonymous poet of jungles & vineyards become, an unknown Pán in the world’s backyard
I married in the Levant, and sired a daughter and son, by deserts, seas, & palms
Suddenly, I was required to become a chauffeur again, in my third decade of life, after many a year
A vagabond poet, teacher and Pán across East Asia, carless, sleeping on slum rooftops, reciting,
My erstwhile driverhood a long-forgotten dream, going the way of teenagehood,
A blurry Arthurian legend
My derelict cars: my trusty steeds---Llamreis,
My pen: my Excalibur pulled out from the stone of a stationery shop,
My hormonally-charged gamut of literary reveries: my Knights of the Round Table,
My beloved girlfriend “La Chanson-de-Dzhess”: my cherished queen Guinevere,
My companion through youth Ed “Cloudhopper” Smith: my Merlin,
My revelrous haunts between Richmond and Washington D.C., where, across the Eastern Seaboard,
All inner poesye flooded all outer thynge: my Camelot, & the secret place I went to think: my Avalon
The governorate of the sepia-sunlit Levant bade me be 16 at 36, and 40 lessons, 2 driving schools,
& 3 final tests later, after years of struggle to find time, between work and the vagaries of parenting,
Instructors’ ailments and COVID-19 lockdowns, and between writing and editing my first two published books: a diwan of poetry, The Moonlit Notebook and a novel in prose-verse My Name is Libya
I most surreally finally was awarded with a wash of great bathos, a driver’s permit, and then license,
For the 2nd time in my life
& yet, I, Ben Qenny, was congratulated and praised by the townspeople of my life
More for this base feat of mechanical operation, than for
The impossible crack-in-Heaven of my diwan and novel
They sat at my foot when I became a certified motor vehicle operator once again, in my proto-old age,
But left a desolate party of one, at my every pining Mushaira.
