Here I am where dreams die young,
Where I see the trapped faces everyday,
Who think of the multi-mega-media star
Who can't deliver his lines this time
As if he finally played his card.
The pages of glory turn
And we are still mired in the smoke of its friction,
The journey through the baseline wilderness where
Everything is not plotted against you, only darkest fog.
The soft padded cats who leap in their youth
From laundry line to drainpipe
Eventually get mist covered
And eat the vermin under the porch,
And start collapsing their way through days
Where joys are more circumscribed and downward leaning;
Gaudy ice patches on the cracked sidewalk
Turn quickly slate grey, that's part of the
Humming forgetfulness, the savage sleep.
I am almost among them, who have almost the knowledge
That human beings don't do these sorts of things.
We were meant to leap and catch and praise,
Prevailing against ice mountains and surly rapids,
Crafting a slingshot from supple young trees.
Who thinks that this urge inevitably leads
To neighborhoods bulldozed down,
Full-capacity trucks moving the bones along,
Machines designed to act and belch as men
Huffing with inhuman persistence,
Mashing steel with rough-shod motions
To ingrained catches, gagging full tilt toward some
Jackpot of gold at the end of the road, some shiny largesse
Left over after the fat of the land has been stripped and sold
To meet the growing need pool. The chairman of the board
Might as well be driving this rig, with his Delaware lawyer
Counting the Hardee's in the side cab, but as the penetration
Goes on all night, the haze and the fur smoke
Take the truck grappler in numb cigarette drags away.
The distant sounds that flow in from other islands
Keep us intact in shared reverie,
Longing for the place no one yet has found
Where we belong.
The cancer stick factory looms, its walls once absorbed
Many charmed voices, who rattled chords,
Who festered in chains, claimed while they sat against its will,
The blazing flame that delivered the hot bombshells
So the choosers had a choice.
One could look through the steel to see the almost reflection of our lesser selves,
Wide magnanimous smiles and brighter than life eyes,
Which we adjusted internally, to what we remembered of mirrors and descriptions.
But the mill allocates to everyone, and takes pain to deny
That it has denied something or someone.
So many changed as the loom adjusted itself in their minds,
Not feeling how its resistance was what kept all of us apart.
Now it drops its saddened shades across
The changing play of bitter winds, an empty warehouse
Echoing, negligible, still stoking against a bare bulb.
Windows without glass, U.S. Government tags, faded slogans,
While the roads have diverted, off to greener fabrications
Of the same life-sustaining illusion.
Now the extras have populated the backdrop,
The needle was pulled out, people exploded out onto the street,
Dashing doleful disenfranchisees
Bounce like pinballs or rats
Along the salted irrigation streams of this city,
Seeking sirloins in dead walks and emptied nooks.
The building still fumes its commands
To these few who have not elected, and so stay.
Stray gladiolas are picked at the corner of Fifth and Edgar,
Herded and shipped to office parks and professional buildings
To muse together and share a well-potted plot
Where mum's the word and the scars are hung like flags to dry.
Others come from temperature controlled rose rooms, misted and massaged,
But they ain't worth a shit unless they're like a million more, only better.
The rivet rattle goes with you everywhere, you carry
The soap scum to another part of the city,
Another scene of another crime,
Another well-oiled mousetrap
That answers us with our order.
This forest is ready to burn.
