J.P. White
The Potato Truck
Anyone in America can fall off the potato truck
And never find a way to get back on.
Anyone can fail to make a payment,
Lose a wallet, a set of keys, a phone, a memory
Of where they were and then make another wrong turn
That lands them in front of a bondsman a few dollars short.
Anyone can get bushwhacked by a digital tsunami
And not get a Green card sent to the wrong address
Anyone can get tangled with the tax man, the repo man,
The immigration man, the man shielding his eyes with a hat.
Anyone can get hacked, wiped out, turned into someone else
And spend years trying to peel back what happened one morning
While they were filling up a tank of gas or sitting inside church light.
Anyone can be attacked by a revenge porn artist and be forced to resign
From everything they ever belonged to,
And then the future becomes only a retrospective.
Anyone can be left with the attorneys who vulture more cash
Then they can ever spend in one pathetic turn of samsara.
Anyone can run out of money to float the insurance needed
To bridge a few months between plans
And then a chance bed is made on a bench with a newspaper blanket.
Anyone can get pulled over, get blinded by a question,
Then be brought to their knees for a busted taillight.
Anyone can get stranded at the wrong place at the wrong time
With a deranged person brokering their fury with a blood demonstration.
Anyone can meet up with an uncatalogued virus,
A rogue bacteria, a threatening lab result not followed up in time.
Anyone can forget to take a pill, take the wrong one, take too many.
Anyone can get misdiagnosed while being overrun by a fever
With no certainty of how to bring it down
Because the source of the infection can’t be found
And no one will become the sleuth to figure the damn thing out.
Anyone can run out of friends and family who know what to say
So they make a point of staying away
Until the person they remember is a wheezing shuffle ghost of no address.
Anyone in America, even the son of a captain of industry
Or the captain himself who knows everything about the thrill of extraction
And how to blur his tracks in an age of satellites and GPS,
Can fall off the potato truck and never find a way to get back on.
J.P. White is the author of the poetry collections The Sleeper at the Party (Defined Providence Press, 2001), The Salt Hour (The University of Illinois Press, 2001), The Pomegranate Tree Speaks from the Dictator’s Garden (Holy Cow Press, 1988), and In Pursuit of Wings (Panache Books, 1978). His essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews and poetry have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, American Poetry Review, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals and anthologies. He holds a BA from New College (1973), an MA from Colorado State University (1977), and an MFA from Vermont College (1990). He lives on Lake Minnetonka near Minneapolis.
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