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.
