Identifying Strange Car Noises

(This is another writing exercise. Take something you don't know anything about, and something you know a lot about, and incorporate them both into a poem. It also must contain found language.)


Somewhere between idle, first, and second gear
there are pots and pans that sneak under the
hood of my car and tango.
I do not venture there for fear that the blind dance,
once seen, would reveal itself a mad bar fight.
The pots never liked the pans. And the pans just
wanted to drink.


Now I am pretty good at sounds but
this manual is asking me to know the difference between
pop click whir hiss rattle squeal clunk.

Cars, like people, communicate when something is not right.


Escort could sing me Berlioz' Fantastique and I would know
why she were crying. She could pop me a beat, she could 
click side by side to the back-and-forth restlessness of
a 1940s metronome and I could answer her in 
two languages. English 
and harmony.
She could squeal a trumpet double G and rattle
the marimba's intestines. 


But until she learns how to
complain to me in a language I can speak,
I crank the volume and flood my
one-ton death trap with 
noises I can comprehend.