Midnight drive

[tectak]

Hi Shar,
I have read the critiques...I have read your responses. I have always had difficulty with the aspirational claim of wishing to be vague, or  deliberately mis-spelling or  to punctuating inventively etc, etc.
It just doesn't carry any weight.
Better to look at your piece, then, with a sympathetic eye as you have written what you wanted to write but not what the crits want you to write. If that seems vague then I meant it that way.....harrrrummmph
So, as this is in Serious, a line by line follows.  

Tires rolling down a strip of asphalt, This kind of open-ended approach to syntax leaves the reader no where. It is early in the poem but you have not shown any attempt to explain consequentiality...so I read this as a none sentence, almost an aide-memoire, a note, a lead in to a more textured cameo. It says something, a car I'm guessing, has tires which roll round and round on the road....so?  
The car gently parts the darkness, Hey...it WAS a car. How about that? Why not say car? You see, it makes something out of nothing, so your words are wasted trying desperately to NOT say car....then you find there is a difficulty with this approach because it COULD be a LIGHT aircraft. Then you have to come clean. All this for what? Don't worry....EVERYONE did it early on; me too, still do...it is called being faux-poetic.
And I, insulated, stare blankly out In spite of what your professor of english says, my professor of english, Prof. A.L.L. Hearsay, is bigger than your professor of english and my professor says that whilst enjambment is not a substitute for punctuation, which includes pauses, it is an unwise man who writes a piece of prose and enjambs for no reason other than the line was visually too long. If you have no meter, no rhyme and no syllable counting you can enjamb wherever you like...but to enjamb preciptously makes the reader fall off a cliff. So think about it when you
do it.
Of tinted windows to the stark night. You could make much more of this concept. The idea of "insulated" is a good one as long as you mean in the sense of being protected from heat or cold or sound...but I don't think you do. I think that you mean isolated. Now, here we go. Please, even though you may hear from others that capitalising every line is a good idea, it isn't. It is a default condition which causes the reader to stumble about, at first trying to get the syntax in to order but then out of blind rage. No one, no one, has ever given me a good reason WHY it is a good idea. I have had lots of bad reasons. Finally, in this stanza, you say "gently parts the darkness" which is excellent as a visual indication of a car, headlights scouring the darkness ahead...but "gently"? I do not relate to gently. What kind of suspension has this car got?...I fear we shall soon regret the "gently" word

The sky is empty, but some distance away
City lights flicker as they swallow up stars.
"Look upon these, ye mighty, and be dismayed*
Oh gods, we need no titans to bring us these flames."** Gratuitously nonsensical interjection of an irrelevent piece of trivia. As for an empty sky full of stars...I leave that to you and others. I remember once writing " ...and in the void, from ages past, all manner of stars and things that last...lit up the empty sky with light and made my day...though it was night". I nearly gave up then. Don't.

I mutter vacantly. The car clutters softly Go on then. I challenge you to mutter vacantly, and expect that you would be up to the task, and so I feel that there IS a meaning in this, without a stretch. Nonetheless, I cannot believe you were not just priming my tolerance (see, I can do it, too) for the "cluttering car"...unless, oh joy, you have delivered yourself in to my hands...surely, not  tachyphemia or tachyphrasia That explains everything.
Away on its trek upon some track of tar For Pete's sake, what is this bitumastic obsession? It is reading like an Aesop's Fable...I fully expect some lofty vagrant to come across a sticky black baby in the middle of the linearly compressed surface of  phenol, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heterocyclic compounds. It is a road...a road.
That mars a land where perhaps some lofty
Vagrant once trod to gaze up, alone, at the stars. Though so...but who he?

*Ozymandias by Shelly
**Myth of Prometheus

My outbursts are not without reason. There is something simple in this piece which you could condense down in to a clear, encapsulated, original distilled thought. You have made a cocktail out of a fine malt whisky...and that is unforgivable. Lucky it is only a metaphor. Pare this down in to the quintessential(s), I see more than one. You might get two poems out of this.
Best,
tectak