it was swell to think the city’s smell is less sickening
than the soulless scent of pressing forests of bristlecone pine
fertilized lawns now sterile with nature’s pesticide,
the crystalline flesh of some cold, lonely comet.
the forests silent and silicate as the moon’s lifeless surface
trees packed, cartooned and phobic, like salted fishes hanging
with no throb of night-dwelling insects to hasten dawn’s arrival
no sidewalk nor always-lit subway maw as a means of escape.
cause of death? no depressive episode could match such exposure;
the mood-numbing nocturne of the inaccessible semi-suburbs
marching off between the sentinel forests of the northeast.