Rubber Snakes

I almost died that night,
    cat screeching in sync
        with skidding tires
while blown-out speakers
         play my dirge in mp.3.
I almost wrapped around that tree--
    mixing blood and iron
       in that mud-grass
          just past the underpass.
Cars passed,
      dancing their headlights
 in the refracted glass-rain,
    like the tunnel-light
        that never came.
But still the radio crackles,
    singing,
       "the good times are killing me"
and I have to agree,
                                you see,
I almost died that night.
Eyeballing that handfull of bliss
    because happiness had thus far
come in pill form,
   prescribed by the bartenders
      with degrees,
         who can't listen
to drunken sailors
    with all these wind-up monkeys
clanging their clanking gongs,
    playing over the quiet music of the ditch,
where life so tenderly takes its leave of us,
        like so many coiled rubber snakes
in God's forgotten toy-box,
    each one hissing,
      "I almossssssssst
                       lived."