Invisible Work

On the walls of my high school
I taped dozens of campaign posters
for George, the invisible man, urging everyone
to vote for him, promising that they would see
results, and my triumph was when my friend Bill,
in on the secret of who was making the posters,
told me I’d made a farce of the whole election.
On the streets of my small town
I would hop out of a yellow Ford Pinto and lie
on the ground while the car sped off,
until someone noticed and then the car
would swoop back, I would hop in,
and we’d do it in another place
until we got tired of the game,
Dead Body, we called it, and the aim
was to startle all those small town people
out of what I imagined was complacency.
In the mailboxes of neighbors I’d never met
I put papers, nonsensical hand-written notes
about our place in the universe and what I knew
about life at 16, words sent into a void
in an adolescent agony of anonymity and angst
we flapped tennis rackets
out the passenger windows of the Pinto
and when my friend Brad got pulled over
he asked me to open the glove compartment
but when I did, a roll of toilet paper
fell out, ready for our next mission:
uncoiling it all over the guest bathroom
of Nancy’s parents, who might have expected it
outside but thought it safe to invite us in.
Another night we drove slowly down Main Street
with my leg hanging out of the trunk.
We drove the wrong way, sober, down Broadway.
I climbed on the top of the Pinto and it felt like flying
and nobody got hurt or noticed our work
to release an excess of exuberance,
survive the force of our feelings,
escape the trap looming in the corner
of my wary eyes. We could always find another way
to leave the heat of that small town behind us
as the Pinto sped up, faster and faster