palmetto to saw grass to scrub oak.
The nature of this place sprawls
completed its slur of sun and distance
sold grassland and forest for vacant lots,
harvest their crop of retribution
(crowns of stars and burning coals).
the three that nests in the one,
the Jesus driving in with the merchandise.
Knobbed fists scratch after all that shines
fire ant, scorpion, horned toad,
flowering yucca flashing its blades,
all that's barbed, bristled, shelled, spiked.
Pale tent poles of God's Big Top
for the dispensation that's always near,
gleaming mirages of metal and glass,
Sun burns through closed lids.
Everywhere, the bleached shell
At the restaurant called Restaurant
in the town on the outskirts of itself,
They crackle haloes of failure.
They come to chew their gravel
The new lumps and the horn of bone.
and the plains brown with grass rot
in their horse trailer of house.
We share cracked-tooth laughter.
A live wasp nest, their chandelier,
hangs its reckless music over us.
Swallow and rush down the dark.
kids carry plastic bags of trash
It speaks gone, blurs to a weather
Across the road the firetruck was steaming.
out of the creek over the bridge railing.
A throng clotted around me drawn by the hope,
the whining engine, clouds and flashing light.
(The sudden sharp smell of canned soup
cooking made me want to vomit.)
Then it lifted ceremoniously into sight,
purple, bloated, lightly goateed.
Under the arms, the cord yanked like a noose.
The paunch billowed from the Harley t-shirt.
A typically dirtball was the consensous.
Stilled and dripping from its umbillical knot,
it ran a chill through us who couldn't see
ourselves gently licked by shame.
This fat kid, failed biker was laid
like a fertilizer bag on the grass
by the curb. "Anybody know his name?"
Pressed into a kind of community there,
we were apart in all circling the same.
"Ain't no badass no more," someone muttered
but I coould only stare at my hands.
The fog of crowd slowly cleared
back to shuttered griefs, badasses everyone.
I peered through my blinds off and on.
Like a giant child's abandoned doll
he lay uncovered there for an hour and when
a drizzle began to fall on our state again,
an orange tarp was thrown for a pall.
Aunts Mavis and Edna, uncle Earl,
if they existed would figure in a poem
of sorts, say, about the trombone slide
The fir tre shudders its cloud
of ice crystals to the ground.
The real aunts and uncle refuse to show
and if they do, casually bruise
The fog of cigarette and cigar smoke
and it gets bigger, spreads in wider circles.
of a cash register rasps at sleep.
The first characters never were,
As we leave this thrown-together
the squalor of flourescence and urine reek
for the cool forgetting of our cars.
in their alabaster vault by the sea,
to read love letters, file rumors,
annex territories of dread and batteries,
question the allegiance of algae,
appoint a task force on the science of repose.
Comptroller of the Four Winds.
It passes with pomp to the thunderous chords
from the Committee on Bouzouki.
As he annoints you with a wreath