Twain

Twain looks out the window at the scenery going by.
"Living in the future must be fascinating," he says.
"Not really," I say.
"Life is always the preoccupied stranger,
Working silently and moving on before you notice."
He taps ashes from his cigar, but they're ethereal as he is
And don't harm the carpet. "That's not half bad," he says,
"May I use it?"
I steer a bit to the left to avoid a small pothole.
"No."

Twain often rides the dark hours with me
When I'm alone on the road at midnight.
Perhaps we get on well because our personalities match
In unfortunate ways; a tendency toward darkest melancholy
And a cynicism about people redeemed only because
It applies to ourselves too.
In any case, he's far better company than Napoleon
(Arrogant ass, genius at killing,
Dunce at everything else) or, Heaven save me,
Ghengis Khan, who wondered why the meat at McDonalds
Wasn't served raw, pointed out
How easy it would be to jump the counter,
Slit everyone's throats and raid the till,
And looked upon me with cold disdain
When I objected to this well-considered plan.

Twain pretends not to recognize the sounds from the radio as music.
He can't quite fathom how computers let us make recordings
Of instruments that don't even exist,
But he understands the basics of the rest of it.
I hold up my cell phone to explain the purpose
Of the wire towers with their blinking lights.

"I love communications technology," he says.
"I was on the leading edge of that, back in my day.
I invested in this typesetting machine.
It had a keyboard like a typewriter--
I used a typewriter too, by the way, I was one of the first,
Since I couldn't hold a pen any more
The way my fingers ached after holding one all those years--
Anyway, a typesetting machine
Where you'd key in the text you wanted,
And the machine would pick the leaden type out of its forms
And set it in the frame for you, ready to print.
Damned unreliable contraption ended up losing all my money
But My God, it was beautiful."