After seeing a “hippy car” in a grocery store parking lot

They ghost the shiny fiberglass and metal. Whispers blur the quaking ginkgo leaves, stirred by an unsettled wind that shakes the darkened ground until my knees bend to uncontrollable, unholy laughter invading all liminal spaces. Who you gonna call for salvation? Ghost painters? They haunt affected cars with outstanding graffiti —a performance on topcoats, a crowded
collage on every quarter-panel, door, and fender. The trunk is a prison for a gang of zombie woofs joining up with space cadets in a synthetic universe. It is a time-traveling, dream-raveling Porsche driven by a twenty-first-century schizoid man, a wizard popping out of the aft deck for divine guidance, its supercharged flux capacitor sparking at warp nine beneath an indestructible polyurethane sheen.

But the nightmares remain trapped beneath the gloss.

   Who will you call to strip the outstanding graffiti?
   Ghost painters haunt the quarter-panels and doors.

   They haunt the doors with an unholy performance,
    uncontrollable laughter invades all liminal spaces.

   Laughter raids the spaces where ginkgo leaves quake,
   stirred by an unsettled wind shaking the darkened ground.

   From darkening ground, a wizard pops out for divine guidance,
   for a twenty-first-century schizophrenic at the wheel.

   A schizoid man steers through a universe of synthetic stars,
   ribboning the curvatures of a dream-traveling galaxy.

   Warp nine through a galaxy of epic wormholes,
   the hood remains a prison for the zombie woofs.

   Hooded zombies trapped beneath an indestructible Imron glaze—
   Who will you really call to strip this marvelous Harvey graffiti?

Luigi Russolo, Dynamism of a Car, 1913

Luigi Russolo, Dynamism of a Car, 1913. Public domain. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris.