The Friday Poem on 31/05/2024
A dramatic monologue in perfectly paced iambic pentameter? Not so surprising in the nineteenth century, but we’re in the twenty-first. Yet here’s a contemporary poet making it all marvellously new. The key to monologue is the voice. To create a believable character, you have to capture that voice and sustain it. Which this poet does, from “My tie a little crooked, and my grin / Bent as a safety pin” to the point where, with a stylish sideways twist, our driver starts to hypothesise about his own type: “Here is this man, / A grown adult, whose creed is that he’ll get / You home intact.” Don’t you feel as if you’ve met him somewhere before? Perhaps quite recently?
Designated Driver
Let them depend on me for once, I think.
I’ll buy their drinks. Get them the round for free,
Let them depend on me. Most of my class
Dropped Mormonism and picked up a beer
When we hit sixteen years, or seventeen.
But still there’s me—my collar crisply pressed,
My tie a little crooked, and my grin
Bent as a safety pin, my lower teeth
In braces still at twenty-two. But straight
In every other aspect. Bartenders
Don’t even ask: they read me at a glance—
You know how women with a baby leak
Because they heard a baby cry? When I
Lift up my voice above the noise to get
The bartender’s attention, I could swear
The soda nozzles weep. I know the brand
Of ginger ale in half a sip. I see
The crew I drove here in my cousin’s jeep
Consider laughing what to make of me—
I have immunity. They’d never ask
That I should change my speed, my style, my brand,
Nor offer me a sip of what they have—
Why ruin a good thing? Here is this man,
A grown adult, whose creed is that he’ll get
You home intact. He lives for that. So screw
The shame you feel when, climbing in the back
Over two sweating laps, you feel the click
And see the driver’s hand reached back to grab
Your strap, and strap you in. What Uber does
For thirty dollars, he will do for free,
And for that brief superiority.
Just let him have it. That’s what he comes back for:
You for your drink, him for his power trip.
Lower your head, suffer that sober glint
That magnifying glass that sets its sight
Upon the shriveled ant, sets it alight.
That’s how you get a ride tomorrow night.
