I Want to Kill the Ice Cream Man
It’s that damned cloying song again,
rising slowly in the distance
as his boxy white truck approaches.
The tune itself varies from place to place.
For me – Turkey in the Straw,
but only four measures,
four gut-wrenching measures
repeating endlessly,
repeating endlessly.
Like someone
pounding the blunt end of a xylophone
into the side of my head
with a five-pound sledgehammer.
And as that satanic vehicle
wends its cursed way through my neighborhood,
the insipid melody
waxes and wanes
in tortuous doppler-shifted tones
that lead relentlessly to my house,
the vile cacophony
building to a crescendo
that makes my eyes bulge—
my head throb.
It’s all I can do
to feign a smile
as my neighbor’s seven-year-old
peers up at the small sliding window.
I smile and wave,
secretly longing for a shotgun
with which to
blow those megaphones
clean off the truck’s roof
and back to the hell
from whence they came.
But instead I just
stand and smile and wave,
wondering what sort of madman
can do this job,
listening to that hellish din for hours on end.
Surely, I think, he must be deaf,
if not as condition of employment,
then no doubt an hour or two
into his first day.
I can easily imagine him
screaming as he thrusts a
bloody Popsicle stick
into each ear.
Today, though, he just
turns up the speaker volume
and drives away,
smiling demonically as he
whistles a tune
no one else can hear.
