zumpoems

Here is the fifth of Zumwalt’s revisions to his set of ten poems in his Sassoon Collection.

v. Auto Tunes

I keep such music in my car
No din this side of death can quell;
Deep bass booming over tar,
And excess forged in death-metal hell.

My dreaming demons will not hear
The roar of guns that would destroy;
My ears embrace the blasts of fear,
Piercing passages of painful joy.

To the world’s end I drove, and found
Death in his carnival of high beam flash;
But in this torrent I was drowned,
And music screeched above
the fiendishly beatific
headlight-lit
fiber-glass,
glittering, splintering,
metalliferous crash.

— zumwalt (2011, revised 2026)

Admin’s Note: This is the fifth piece in Zumwalt’s ten-poem tribute to poet Siegfried Sassoon, The Sassoon Collection, originally written in 2011, recently revised. Auto Tunes is based on Sassoon’s Secret Music. This tribute traces the exact architecture of Sassoon’s poem, turning his internal refuge from the war (“I keep such music in my brain / No din this side of death can quell”) into a heavy-metal vehicle collision