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.