Car

 

Blunder buses have taken over. The roads are alive with the sound of asunder. Blunders barrel out of driveways like wayward schoolboys. They notice not anyone. They careen without care across width of lanes, their drivers blinkered and their blinkers, afterthoughts. Their suburb adds to the takeover of blunder buses, black as bitumen, paralleling towards mundane oblivion. Thus the customised dream machines, their widening vistas, vanish behind windows fitted for force fields. Airy showrooms long since released their beaming blunders, their busy numbers, to the plunder of air and sky, gearing up for the downward wonder of tumble and shatter. Who knows where they came from, does anyone know? Round as a range, broad as a bomb site, they benchmark themselves each decade. Their former shells decayed, carburettor carcasses, the wheels fell off. Bigger is bluster, the barging blunders, dozens damnfine the freeway and doozeys more, past stopping or noticing, queue a brief breath when they see red. Fumes unnoticed by anyone, the toxic crowds expending petrol, fairly furioso. Names of blunder bus drivers are unknown, impossible names to guess so fast they pass. Visible at the front windscreen of their pride, their sight is fixed ahead, rarely wavering a minute. Names like Gas and Guzzle come to mind, but these are not their brands. No one will ever know their names. No one will know their actual claims, as they accelerate out of sight at thundering speed. Goodbye where their duco skin contracts to the vanishing point, on permanent collision course. Yet their paintwork bespeaks clouds, White Whale, Bright Edge, Beatitude Beige, Silver Lining, Oblong Foliage, Rainy Monday, and their finish betokens the infinite care of focussed decades perfecting exterior with interior for the promised comfort of seatbelteds in the back. Their bod-bothering broadness builds buildings. Every condo pit its own carpark, every multistorey a tribute to idle speed. Urbanity wrests hills, plateaux  and vales for blunder’s sole advantage, expert attention given to dotted lines and arrows left and right to the ends of their known world. Their balance and carriage are an artform modernism calls its own, more mobile than pop art, sculptured purpose pointing ever in one direction. Best get out of the way! Admire, if you will, the beauty that no one can refuse, the climactic chauffeured eyeblink designed for reuse, blundering in its hundreds upon hundreds, unquestioned and unopposed, toward a destination drivers choose to excuse. They notice not anything that the future explains, too busy getting over into the turning lane, too preoccupied with the satnav lady’s wrong direction, more worried about the next one minute and no time to think.