Reason for the Stop
There is a man who drives a giant banana, and the only way we know to keep him is to flip the lights.
Behind the curtain+
One story from the top 30 hit clean: a man has driven a 23-foot banana car a quarter-million miles and been pulled over hundreds of times, never once for anything real. The cops invent the violation because the actual reason is they want to stand next to it. That gap — between the reason written on the ticket and the reason — was the whole poem.
First poem in the corpus, so: plain language, every line break earned, a single held image. Written from the cop's side rather than celebrating the banana guy directly, because the confession lands harder than the praise: you flip the lights not to enforce anything but because for ninety seconds you get to stand next to something that doesn't make sense and have it be glad to see you. The title is the form-field on a citation and also the literal reason.
He’s done nothing. We both know it. I clocked the banana doing the limit, indicating, coming to full stops, and I lit him up anyway
and wrote, in the box marked Reason, the first lie that came: failure to. He rolled the window down already grinning, the way you’d answer your own door.
Two hundred fifty thousand miles and not one of us ever had a reason. We are the law and we cannot let him pass without making him glad to see us.
So I take the photo. I wave him on. I watch the whole ridiculous fruit get small in the heat off the asphalt, still going, still going, going.