Most nightmares make us run. The speaker of Nathaniel S. Rounds's poem is offered a lift instead. Having woken "from slow-wave sleep" and "failed to keep on the down low," he ends up as a passenger in a car driven by his own anxieties. The poem's central idea is a loss of control that feels almost polite. Panic and Fear don't kidnap him. He "succumbed to bumming a ride," and the grammar of surrender is the real subject. The title makes the same point with a twist on a familiar phrase: we expect "we did as we pleased," but here "we did as they pleased." Someone else is steering.
The opening mixes registers in a way that keeps the reader off balance. "In the seventeenth year of Joe of the son of Frank" imitates the solemn dating of old chronicles ("in the seventeenth year of the reign of...") but swaps the king for a plain "Joe" and tangles the genealogy into "of the son of." Judging by the tone, the poem seems to dress a private, small-hours experience in the grandeur of official record, though the poem never says who Joe is. Next comes the clinical "slow-wave sleep," then the street slang of "down low," and then the stiff, formal "succumbed" set beside the shabby "bumming." The speaker's voice never settles, which suits a mind caught between sleeping and waking.
The two drivers are personified with a shrug: "Panic and his side-kick, Fear." Calling Fear a sidekick makes it comic, and that humour sharpens the dread. The poem then adds "strange dream men in suits" who "appeared and reappeared." Suits suggest offices and authority, so these figures feel faceless and official, which fits the title's "they," though the poem never explains who they are. Sound does quiet work here too. "Fear," "appeared" and "reappeared" all rhyme, so the word keeps coming back, just as the men do. The isolated line "They were" hangs alone before the description arrives, as if the speaker needed a breath before naming them.
The chase scene depends on a contradiction. The men "crept like the grim reaper / With the scenery's machinery / in hot pursuit." Creeping is slow, pursuit is hot, and nightmares work exactly like this, with something relentless closing in while you can't move. "Scenery's machinery" is a neat rhyme, and it makes the landscape sound like a stage set with ropes and pulleys behind it. The world outside the car window feels staged and mechanical, and the speaker is not the director.
Then comes the poem's best image: "And I between the two in the front car seat / Like meat that meets between / Slices of hard bread." It is a sandwich simile, domestic and almost funny, and it is grim underneath. The speaker is the filling, soft and edible, pressed between two unyielding slices. The near-pun of "meat" and "meets" ties the image together, and "seat" joins the same sound. In fact the poem is full of that long *ee* (sleep, keep, fear, appeared, reaper, scenery, between), a thin, high note that works like a whine or a siren running under the whole piece.
The ending is the most open part. "The highway stops singing / Night terror songs aplenty." The road's usual hum, which lulls drivers and passengers, falls away, yet "songs" are still said to be plentiful. It is unclear whether the silence has been replaced by the terrors or whether the terrors are what the highway now sings. The phrase "night terror" also loops back to "slow-wave sleep." That is the stage of deep sleep in which night terrors occur, so the poem ends where it began, inside the sleep it woke from. The lack of a final full stop adds to this, because the ride is not shown ending.
The poem is not polished or regular. It is free verse with no steady rhythm and lines of wildly different lengths. What makes it worth reading is how much it does with so little: it turns anxiety into a road trip, it finds humour in terror, and it shows helplessness through small word choices ("succumbed," "bumming," "between") rather than through shouting. The result is a short, strange, memorable picture of being carried along by feelings you never agreed to ride with.