Let’s blame it on the times:
scattering before headlights
from mining trucks. Swaying tracks
arrest both lanes, dinosaur pads
wait for them to pass
before we can move on,
but the road is getting lean.
Buy a pen and I’ll draw
where money is born:
hole in the ground, catheter
seep from sepsis, drips through every
layer. We stand on filter paper:
nothing gets through
that won’t be discarded.
Chapters thicken like burns
and we carry stanzas home
with 5pm fidelity. Budget
for bliss. We’ll laugh all the way
to something.
There isn’t enough to strain
this season of sameness,
grilled up north out of sight,
but we’re filtering the bigger picture
through stones and stubs and strikes.
You’re out. There is life here, and it is wrapped
in plastic. A miracle of hauntings
and we have forgotten nothing.
The lines still run underground
and in rivers raw with split fish.
Taxation is no limit, poetry has no queue.
Dug up and dried out, we know
the solemnity of being bought,
but celebrate being paid for.