Pandora’s Closing Boxes and She’s Leaving Them on the Backroads

I stole it off a dead man in Virginia –
not on the sandy coast, I wandered squishy deep
inside where the red dirt piles high and
folds in on itself like an accordion junkyard,
on a tobacco-stained hill with long vowels,
short lives and coal-lined lungs, that’s where I
stopped on the side of the dusty road and plucked it like
a cardboard plum with my spidery hands:
it’s the size of my knee, round and blue and
always icy, it likes basking in the sun on my
dashboard, it has its own gravity it drinks
reflected sunrises and eighties ballads and
GPS directions and the sideways thumbs of lost
hitchhikers inside.
I bought it for you.

We drive together,
the box and I
(not you and I, we
drove all night that night with headlights dimmed in a muddy field and we spun in circles until you puked in my lap as we hung from the ceiling of the car like spiders and I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you as my comma, a short breath before I left you again, and again, and again,)

We drive until my eyes purple and shadow like my dead
Virginian salesman, until I eat at my last free breakfast buffet
I burn the waffles and that night I open the box I want the
gravity to suck me in and fold into a single point of vibrating matter, the type
disarrayed men with unruly hair on late night cable television rhapsodize about with
akimbo arms and white teeth, they’ll sing about my transcended
essence on basic cable astrophysics documentaries neglected at three a.m.
But the box remains heavy and cold, I press my cheek against it I hold it to my chest,
I leave it by the Bible in the nightstand I am too empty for this
container I have nothing to steal.