The City Is Electric Around Me
The city is electric around me,
The neon signs coldly glow;
But some velvet chain has caught me,
And I'm shackled, staying close.
The billboards keep on flickering
Their cheap promises like snow;
Her hand rests on the gearshift—
I'm a captive, won't let go.
Highways bleeding into highways,
Gas station lights below;
But nothing safe can shake me;
I'm enchanted, this is home.
The coffee tastes like gasoline and devotion. Her profile in the dashboard light—jaw set, eyes fixed on asphalt—is the only constellation I need. We're doing seventy on the bypass, windows cracked to let the diesel and exhaust hymn through, and I know this is dangerous. I know her laugh has teeth. I know the way she takes corners makes my stomach drop like freefall, like the first time I said her name out loud and heard how it sounded in my own voice—reckless, hungry, mine.
But the spell is this: the city at 2 a.m. with her hand occasionally leaving the wheel to brush my knee. The 7-Eleven coffee in the cupholder still steaming. The way she drives like she's trying to outrun something and I'm just cargo she can't quite shake. Motion as magic. Speed as sacrament.
I could ask her to stop. To let me out at the next light, safe and sober and home by three. But the neon keeps bleeding past the windows—red, blue, golden arches, liquor store crosses—and every sign says STAY. Every mile says YOURS. Every curve in the road is just another excuse to lean into her gravity.
Nothing safe can shake me. Not my mother's voice in my head. Not the job I should be sleeping for. Not how she says my name like it's borrowed, like maybe she'll give it back.
I'm enchanted, this is home.
The city's got its claws in me. Or maybe it's just her—same difference. Same tyrant. Same velvet cage lined with brake lights and cheap coffee and the particular way she says my name when she's concentrating on the merge.
Highways bleeding into highways. I'd ride them all. I'd let her drive us straight off the edge of the known world if it meant one more hour of this—the hum of wheels on pavement, her voice cutting through static on the radio she won't turn up because she likes the quiet better, the way the streetlights turn her face into something holy and feral at once.
Let the storm descend. Let the engine scream. Let morning come with its cruel accountability.
I'm snowed in by choice, drunk on motion, shackled to the passenger seat of her rust-bucket chariot.
And I'm a captive, won't let go.
Did my poem sound just a little bit familiar to you? It just may, because I modeled off a poem by Emily Bronte. I dissected that poem more thoroughly
HERE.
The difference is just in the devotional object. Brontë married the night itself—solitude, wilderness, the romantic sublime. Mine is more specific, more human: her hand on the gearshift, her profile in dashboard light, the particular way she says my name like it's a secret she's testing in her mouth.
But the spell structure is identical. We're both saying the same thing across centuries: I found something that makes me feel alive, and I'd rather freeze in its presence than thaw anywhere else.
I didn't copy her. I translated her. Took her gothic moor and made it neon-lit highway. Took her snow-bent trees and made them flickering billboards. Kept the skeleton—the tyrant spell, the three-stanza devotional, the refrain that shifts from helpless to willing—and dressed it in my own gorgeous ruin.
It's an homage that understands the assignment: beauty is a cage we choose. Danger is just another name for devotion. And sometimes the only way to say "I love you" is to say "I will not leave."
Sometimes you don't escape the night. Sometimes you just change the landscape it lives in—trade Brontë's storm for brake lights and cheap coffee, her bare branches for power lines humming overhead. But the devotion tastes the same. The shackles fit just as prettily.
