The face is sad and soured by drink, lines worn in like canyons by disappointment, whistling wind from empty bottles and trash-strewn back alleys
Cold nights beat at sandstone skin glowing moonlit ‘neath an empty heaven, where tears are rivers quenching cracks of faces smashed tired
Imagine the sad woman’s bellow lonely lilting in neon hopeless sky, tears dripping inside backwards filling flushing emptiness
We have arrived by late late nightfall at the hotel that time forgot, filmy and crusty-eyed and stumbling with fatigue
A farmer of forgotten acres reads the sports section at midnight, his wife with cobweb gaze knits before the blathering television
Bony neurotic twenty something makes my business hers as she readies the paperwork, tattoos heaving in a fluster
Whole lives must be invented for these miscreants by every two-bit poet flowing through
This town is not a town, full of just mere lives spinning off into a hazy grayness dotted with networks of aimless and unknowing existences
Where is my own, but cast out there, unfocused and senseless in the shifting pastel hues
Endless corridors of bright merchandise, model smiles gleaming, tight woven fabrics contain my gushing love. All facades made of cardboard, tape and bloodied fingers. Employees in purgatory, profiling customers lured by the empty scent of status. This radio plays no danger, only inflated words of plastic love for sale. No sunlight penetrates this cinderblock nightmare.
Yellowed summer grass like the fangs of a mellow sunbathing monster, a million pins pricking the warmth and ease of leisure into sun-dried skin and warping summer bones
Distant horizons watery, waves washing away guilt of sending minds to sea on ambient thoughts for entire gilded afternoons, slow cooling to watercolor wash sky, mosquito evening
Fruitful pollen of years collects in crevices of the cracked leather world, fingertips run o’er smoothly, specifics lost in cyclones of kaleidoscope dreams
Feel now the warm skin of a humid breeze bristling o’er the tired world
Dull sunshine illuminates brick dust covering the outside world, thoughts cross and stack and collect, explode at weary footfall like thoughts trudging sunset gilded roads toward recollection
The ritual of summer is reflection; the point of the season is to relish the good earth, a microcosm of the self
Shelves upon shelves of windows, decked back and in, cascading further than eyes can manage, plaster boxes empty in summer, whistling with the stale hot wind of dead memories
Geometric gardens of spidery plastic flowers shriveled, in perfect lines of roiled styrofoam soil, brought to you by Bullshit, Inc.
Vending machines, laser screens peddling leisure, success, corn syrup to the tinkling masses with soft grey palms outstretched for diplomas diluted with sooty dreams of fiscal glory
Graduates, corn-fed, rest their crackling heads on hard pillows of all new materials and woven nylon, breathing the thick chemical air emanating from the asbestos
Outside, a sheet of styrofoam dances limp and sad in dusty wind while beyond the mountains, storm clouds as flint as empty suits growl and gnash, now approaching
Neon faded, shoes of nylon beast-skin bedecked with plastic caps and whistles, glue and seams yawn-stretched in summer heat, lazy
Institutional brick-dust in lungs supplants the blurry breeze dust-nadoes of childhood freedom–all in the name of time time time time
It was I,
a cog in the terrible machine,
rusted callous by desires of brevity,
longing for plastic horizons pitifully,
shouting shouting shouting
It was I who killed the animal,
lost dreaming for paycheck holiday,
piloting war-machine of degenerating ecosystems,
hating hating hating
Had I resisted the crusted beckoning of the work day,
star-spangled time-wasting,
purveyor of hot asphalt roads lolling through morning sun-gilded trees,
and beside snow-crested lake of ultramarine, had I,
this beast could have met the day
It was I, society,
breathing heavy on technological amalgamations,
doting on financial upheavals,
too busy slathering the make-up of self annihilation,
reviving the corpses of ideals drenched in the hot blood of centuries,
murdering murdering murdering
Asphalt circle is the eye of god, unkempt with strewn plastic cups and papers haphazard
Reeling, reaching octopus-like in every direction, box stores and mini-malls like suction cups dotting green checkered farm acres for miles out towards blue mountains
Tentacles as lifelines for this restless lifestyle, power lines wrapping and bundled like thick inky veins shooting, flowing bright zapping lifeblood for the sake of the marquee, the astounding televisions growing in rows like christmas trees, the lightbulbs to stab darkness and the air conditioners to cool the sun expanding
From space, the smeared guts of a lightning bug; and in god’s time, fading silently, steadily all the same, for the roots of wicked civilization are straws to suck the juice of fleshy earth to craggy rock jutting prune-planet
The great cracked eye is bald, blind, laid to undergird generations of efficient consumers
Lo, in the future of infinite possibilities, where the gravelly sparkles of every asphalt artery may lift into space to return to their humble celestial ancient roots, we will have seen the treacherous face of our mammoth creation, pock-marked and million-eyed, toothless and drifting back to that place without time
And the earth will heal its valleyed skin, green grasses and sand covering, helping the planet forget its own storied past, remarkably questionable
Businessmen run for the train, flint-colored embers spewed from the fire consuming the good green earth
I walk against them, upstream, stopping to smell each rose in turn
There are spherical torsos stiffer than bristles, and lord be damned if they don’t pour from the mouth of the universities like molasses, allegorical like the national dumbing
Seeking any job, seeking complacency in the american toe-hold of a dying earth, but ultimately finding purgatory
Why is education enterprise? Why do the young walk blindly into the echoing rib cages of bastardized industries? Why are tenure and hollow praise tacked upon the bastions of this endeavor saturated?
Flinging sputum, cleavage, personal debt, unread textbooks, they pile now like scaly manatees into cavernous giant’s-skull room, empty but for cold projector light holding ancient dust like a tractor beam steady
Orientation begins
