The gruff factory worker
in the coarse leather boots
and stained zubaz pants,
yelped with displeasure
when the tour guide of
the Pullman company town
revealed himself to be a
PhD candidate in English
during a Q-and-A.

He questioned his credentials,
dismissed him as overeducated,
as soft-palmed, not of his caste,
loudly declared that he was
just another bureaucrat in waiting.

"Institutions just exist to perpetuate
themselves; they don't care about
the people, just about keeping
themselves alive," he theatrically
confided to his friend,
wanting to make sure he heard him,
took note of his flagrant, raging skepticism.

"They got to pay the lawyers."

"All these institutions, they don't care about the workers."

We strode on, amid the shadowed reaches of the empty train car factory the owners long ago abandoned to the rustling prairie,
left to the wind and weeds and elements.

"Fake news, fake news!"
The boy cried fake news every time a story
failed to paint him in the most positive possible light,
neglected to deify him in the most sunny way.
He denounced, decried and denigrated
reporters who would check with two more sources
if their moms claimed to love them
the way their ink-stained forebears did.
He attempted to discredit truth-seekers
who actually had stricter codes of ethics than doctors,
cops, actuaries,  
any profession really.

The callow boy cried fake news so much that
his most loyal followers shouted “fake news” out car windows
at TV reporters reporting on alligators that crossed the street,
fired drive-by potshots at newsrooms out of sheer lunacy.
The boy cried fake news so much
that he did protest too much, that his cries sounded fake,
that his credibility strained
against the press corps who produced
backing documents, audio recordings and multiple sources.
The boy cried fake news so much
it degenerated into cliche and ceased to mean anything at all.

The boy cried fake news at a time when the news
felt financial pressured into running clickbait articles like
“Eight Hanukkah Lessons I Learned from
Smoking a Menorah ****”
or the “12 Most *** Days of Christmas.”

Amid the glitz and blinking lights of the theater district,
where even the obligatory McDonald’s was dolled up
with flash and pizzazz, a showy two stories with a Vegas marquee.

we strode into the buzzing, lavishly appointed lobby
in creased jeans and wrinkled T-shirts,
and loaded up on draft latte cans, single-origin tea, and IPAs.

We ascended to the balcony seats I once thought were
the sacred preserve of aristocrats, but which turned out
to be the cheapest seats in the house if the view was obstructed.

True, our grandparents dressed up for such occasions.
But their contemporaries were the indecorous ones
who failed to turn their phones off after multiple warnings.

The play wasn't a musical,
but it was serenaded with factory-issue ringtones
that chirped and chirped over the playwright's dreamscape.

The liquidation sale went on and on and on.
Trudging lines of bedraggled souls stretched seemingly for miles.
Those soulless carrion birds, with cartfuls of deep discounts,
looked you right in the eye, said how sorry they were.

The last few weeks, we waited for someone, anyone
to buy the last few tchotchkes, fixtures, headless mannequins.
America haunted that half-vacant big box store,
was embodied in a row of limbless mannequins.

No reservations, no known points, no fish on Mondays,
no more warthog ****** or fermented shark,
nothing but kitchen omerta out the steamy back-alley backdoor,
nothing but adventure, exploration, basic human decency.

Nothing but grace and love and travel,
nothing but a steaming *** full of public love in the end,
nothing but leather and curiosity,
nothing but a hot bowl of noodles in a not-so-alien land.  

Nothing but a friend in a foreign place,
inviting us all to be so understanding,
inviting us all to be less afraid of the exotic,
inviting us all to be our best selves in the end.

The Space Age saucer at LAX,
you know the one,
hovers overhead,
a retro-futuristic Jetsons-like totem,
a shimmering stucco vision of a far-off future
in which an overbearing security state
shuts down a well-regarded restaurant with a view
that landed smack dab in a well-trafficked area.

LAX, and LA generally,
reminds one of how much time
amounts to a buzzsaw shredding everything
into a mist of fine but coarse-grained sawdust.

No matter how dire it gets,
no matter how despairing,
no matter how forlorn, how hopeless,
no matter how little reason there seems to be to go on,

Kendrick Lamar spat fire and spoke truth,
at least for a few years,
as did a few hundred other contemporaneous artists
who laid it down on the track.

Emily Dickinson
did not stop for death or thee,
but prolifically tackled issues
of universal import in her lapidary recluse's verse.


Chakaia Booker turned shredded tires into museum centerpieces,
hunted spirits, eluded the chimera of consumption,
forged reclaimed rubber into toughness,
a rough-hewn canvas for a displaced people.


You can have nothing going for you,
nothing substantial to look forward to,
nothing above to guide you,
nothing but averted eyes on the street and professional shame,
but still be transported away
by a few glorious minutes of song or poetry or sculpture.

When there's nothing else, there's always art.
No matter what, there's always art.