Better Than Silence/Better Than Shame

we’d let the radio do the talking when we drove,
your hands on the steering wheel and mine
in my lap while the radio spit
static across the fifty-one, flashes of drums and
guitars and voices slipping through every so
often
and after a while the songs would all sound
the same
and you would complain,
always complain,
about the radio and about the car and about this town,
about your life and about us, about
the endless dead ends and endless traffic and endless screaming
static on the radio.

and I would count the bumper stickers in traffic and
trace the marks you’d left on my neck the night before and
think about how you’d always inch closer to the
door when you stayed over, and
the radio would screech, voices in time with the brakes and the
static weaving in and out
through the lanes of cars
and I’d think about the times you would sing along,
sing to me,
before your jaw set and before we only heard
static on the radio.

and you’d reach for the cigarettes in the glove
compartment and I’d roll down the window and
play with the volume control while
your lighter clicked in time with the flashes of music as
I turned it louder, the speaker buzzing against
my leg and we both knew that soon the music would
fall away and all we’d be able to do was
justify, to talk away the
static on the radio.
♠ ♠ ♠
I don't usually write poetry, but my freshman year of college I took a weeklong winter term class called "the art and business of poetry" and it was pretty fun. this is a slightly edited & rewritten version of a poem written for that class.