LET FREDDIE MERCURY DRIVE

I smashed your little brother’s Atari to build us a time machine. It’s got two banana seats and it’s ready like a sling shot to flick us back three decades. It’s dialed into 1976. I invited Freddie Mercury. To witness it. To believe it. To believe in me. He’s got his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel and we’re goin’ right for Tatum O’Neal. You remind me of her dammit and I hate you for it. Wearing baseball caps you guys your hair comes off your ears like perfect feathers, like angel wings. Any way the wind blows. I want to do it all over again. Better this time. More time heavy petting. More time under the Star Wars sheets. More time under kangaroo jackets with chapped hands on bumpy nipples. I called them mosquito bites and you called me a boner. But I was scared and I guess I still am.

Each morning I get up I die a little. I move words around on the computer screen for the daily paper. Make lies read like truth and truth read like lies. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Mamma oooo I want to quit. Quit feeling older, quit balding, quit dying. Sometimes wish I’d never been born at all. I don’t want to type. I want to scribble on that plaster cast on your arm with a blue Bic pen. Write over and over: help me get better soon.

Let’s close our eyes while Freddie twists the key and fiddles with knobs. Turbo blasters on super duper maximum, okay. Now imagine we are being whip-smacked into the past so fast we can smell smoking hot inner tubes. And hold on to me. Tighter. Tighter even. Like you could die if you ever let me go. And if we’re not back again this time tomorrow carry on, carry on. As if nothing really matters.

ROSS BRAGG