Free will sounds like a prize until this poem shows what it buys: a patrol car, a spotlight, and nobody to arrest. Nathaniel S. Rounds begins in a room the speaker wants to leave, and the reason is funny and a little sad: the broom in the corner "has declared itself a stranger." Even the household objects have cut him off. Rather than linger there, he "takes to" the road. That unfinished phrase, alone on its own line, is the hinge of the poem. It throws us out of the house the way the speaker throws himself out of the door.
What follows is a patrol with no authority and no crime. A Crown Victoria with a "post-mount spotlight" is equipment associated with police work, yet he uses it to look for "historical figures in beaver top hats" and finds only "jean short-clad armadillos." The joke works because he sounds so official about it. Notice the sudden "we" in "Mostly we get." Nothing else in the poem is plural, so the word either invents a department of one or smuggles in a companion who never appears. Either way, loneliness is dressed up as procedure.
The grammar copies the driving. After "So I take to," the poem rolls out a string of participles (Driving, Looking, Wandering, Searching) with almost no punctuation. The sentence never reaches a destination, just like the car. There is no rhyme and no steady meter, only a loose, conversational rhythm that trudges through the long opening line and then lurches forward in the short one. Sound still does quiet work. "Room" and "broom" chime across the line break, and the hard consonants of "Dumpster dive" and "steel-toned" give the middle of the poem a clunky, scavenging feel. Single-line stanzas such as "Searching the gutters for empties" stand apart like objects glimpsed from a moving window. "Empties" is a clever word to leave hanging, since it means bottles in the gutter and also hints at the speaker's own state.
The imagery piles up odd, low-grade details. He marks the miles "By counting cheeseburgers and palm trees," which puts fast food and scenery on the same level, as if both were just markers of distance. The palm trees, the shore and the armadillos suggest a warm, southern coastal setting, though the poem never names one. "Watch time fly in my rear view window" twists the old cliché. Time does not soar overhead here; it recedes behind him, something he is driving away from and cannot outrun. The radio gets the same scavenging treatment as the gutters: he "dumpster dives" the news "for clues regarding storm patterns." Judging by the imagery, the storms are probably more than weather. The host's "steel-toned coolness" and "white collar" voice are everything the speaker is not, calm and settled and respectable, and he gets lost in it.
The last stanza is the strangest and the most revealing. "Carp in a barrel" echoes the phrase about fish in a barrel, a creature trapped and easy to hit, and "carp" is also what we do when we complain. The sound of the word nudges toward "carpe diem," seize the day. "Curriculum vitae" is the record of a purposeful life, a résumé. The speaker admits, in the shrugging grammar of "Always got those two mixed up," that he cannot tell his trapped condition from his life story. The deadpan keeps the poem from tipping into self-pity, but the confusion is the real confession.
That is why the poem lingers. The title promises an answer to what free will gets you, and the poem answers with a list: a borrowed-looking cruiser, empties, cheeseburgers, a radio voice. It does not complain about freedom, and it does not celebrate it either. It lets the freedom look ridiculous and lonely, and it is funny enough that we laugh before we notice how much room there is to be lost in.