Second Chance Crack-up

Four and a half sleeping pills past 2 a.m.,
I slipped out of bed, my head still hammered

by his voice, though it had faded
to air flutters brushing his throat,

and snatched up an unfinished dreamcatcher,
tying off yarn tails with gold stars

and crescent moons as cunning
as miniature cookie cutters.

What is the moon’s truth? A cratered face
without an atmosphere to burn meteor hits?

I dropped the dreamcatcher for the hum
that would disappear me to the nowhere

forbidden by DSM-5 charlatans
who dispensed green pills that dispatched me,

on lucky nights, to dreamless lands
until dawn broke, with thoughts roller-coasting

like 4-D rides dropping headfirst
at one hundred miles per hour

then shooting up and spiraling off—
shrinks make lousy magicians.

The convertible waited on concrete
scrubbed by a high-pressure garden hose.

Slammed inside, I leaned in to turn the key
and then reclined, waiting for drowsiness

to cloud the clock blazing annoyance
with the flip-flip of yellow minutes;

finally, I spun the dial hunting a tune:
Where the hell was Mozart’s Requiem Mass?

No one should die to BBC news drone,
but that’s all you get on Greenwich Mean Time—

the engine rattled, and I killed the motor,
buckling over in a second chance crack-up:

my now, to somewhere—in a ragtop,
in a garage, with broken windows.

Catherine Hamrick is a copywriter in the greater Atlanta area. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Blue Mountain Review, storySouth, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel: Appalachian Witness, The Ekphrastic Review, Sparks of Calliope, Vita Brevis Poetry Magazine, Willows Wept Review, and elsewhere. Find her online at https://randomstoryteller.com.