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0 Comments | Jul 11, 2016

I Want to Kill the Ice Cream Man

fullsizerender1It’s that damned cloying song again,

rising slowly in the distance

as his boxy white truck approaches.

The tune itself varies from place to place.

For me – Turkey in the Straw,

but only four measures,

four gut-wrenching measures

repeating endlessly,

repeating endlessly.

Like someone

pounding the blunt end of a xylophone

into the side of my head

with a five-pound sledgehammer.

 

And as that satanic vehicle

wends its cursed way through my neighborhood,

the insipid melody

waxes and wanes

in tortuous doppler-shifted tones

that lead relentlessly to my house,

the vile cacophony

building to a crescendo

that makes my eyes bulge—

my head throb.

 

It’s all I can do

to feign a smile

as my neighbor’s seven-year-old

peers up at the small sliding window.

I smile and wave,

secretly longing for a shotgun

with which to

blow those megaphones

clean off the truck’s roof

and back to the hell

from whence they came.

 

But instead I just

stand and smile and wave,

wondering what sort of madman

can do this job,

listening to that hellish din for hours on end.

Surely, I think, he must be deaf,

if not as condition of employment,

then no doubt an hour or two

into his first day.

I can easily imagine him

screaming as he thrusts a

bloody Popsicle stick

into each ear.

 

Today, though, he just

turns up the speaker volume

and drives away,

smiling demonically as he

whistles a tune

no one else can hear.

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