It sits out in your driveway
a glittering metallic sculpture.
It costs more than your house,
you love it more than your spouse.
You can hardly drive it, it’s too high,
you can barely park it, it’s so wide.
Like an exotic compulsion, you need it,
though you can barely afford to feed it.
There’s a cockpit with winking tech,
offering a printer, wi-fi and refrigeration.
It can pull a house off its foundation.
Is there a tendentious ecological statement,
in this prestigious monster you claim is for work?
Is the fact that it’s tax deductible just a perk?
With this polished and pampered machine,
you get the rewards of effective parenting,
as it literally reflects the care that it’s given.
It’s a spaceship ready for expedition,
what else in creation is as elysian,
as your gigantic pickup truck.
.
.
songs for this:
Dreamin’ by G. Love and Special Sauce
Driving by Everything but the Girl
Get Me Some by Drew Love, TOKiMONSTA & Dumbfoundead

I am from

Moments that felt like holding on to something that is slipping away

I am from Christmas mornings
Heart leaping
A child’s excitement
Pulling my father down the stairs
He is all scattered gray hair
Pointing every which a way
And a soft Scottish accent,
Chuckling,
And my mother is all smiles,
Eyes bright and laughing

But always, the smile is pulled tight
And behind it all,
Pain,
Pain resting upon her
Like an invisible cloak

And I am cross legged on the floor
Eyes bright with the reflection of Christmas lights
Pushing away the too-old-for-my-age knowledge that
One day
One day
my mother is going to break

And I am going to lose her.

Waco
Ruby Ridge
Jackson State

May 4th
Kent State

(4 dead in Ohio)

It must be dark
out here in the cold penumbra,
where mile after mile
no one smiles,

dots and loops,
dots and loops,
a kind of blissful nullity,
beautiful and pointless,

wearing at the edges
it almost stings,
seclusion unraveling
at the underground in us all,

aubade aberrations abound,
challenging the orthodoxy
of the troublesome
morning road,

but should this near-life experience
hydroplane toward
another mineshaft, it helps to know
less is less, not more.