JAMES CAGNEY

“How to Operate Heavy Machinery”

HOW TO OPERATE HEAVY MACHINERY

(circa 1978)

1. Think of yourself as a medical specialist puzzling over the diagnosis for a machine’s stubborn silence, its symptoms of tremors and smoke.
2. Dip the doughnut of your torque converter into a steaming cup of black oil. Stainless steel carbide bologna sandwiches. Fan belt licorice. License plate soup.
3. A bowl of lug nuts bubbles the red milk of transmission fluid like tadpoles. Brackets and spark plugs breach greasy cookie jars on your automotive spice shelf.
4. Examine the patient through a stethoscopic sheet of Marlboro smoke, an x-ray on a light-board. Translate the fevered gibberish of an engine in idle.
5. Let the sun pause before your workshop to hang stars above the door. Ignore the son and his failing starter. Consider you might be a better god to a society of steel. Know how to put them in their place.
6. Give yourself a fuel treatment. Lunch of bourbon on kerosene rocks. Brake Fluid ice cream. Backfire of kick-started beer cans spewing.
7. Witch doctor with a ratcheting wrench through your nose—your ignited blue hands assemble metallic dreams.
8. There is no better mattress than cardboard on a sidewalk or driveway, Rorschach patterned in oil, a crunch of sand sprinkled as before a tap-dancer.
   Your wife and son know this, too…

                Stranded on the porch, watching you, ready to run.