Arrival

2008-09-08T18:12:00.000-07:00

Among us
there are whole lineages
of ill begotten
inventors
tending to
subtle aspirations

unbridled

somewhere
they are succumbing
quietly
to some
unseen
disbelief

And now
we are to
build a jube
of appendages
and trash
to support
their ilk

In 1984
We were long promises
of aluminum fencing
outstretched over the backwater
as industrial artifacts
pretending to be jobs

You had no breasts

In their absence
was a candy dress
your mother refused to eat
Thinking it more like garbage
and less like
your body

At night,
Alpha Centauri
rolls dank
through long specter miles
of vinyl siding

gaining on us

2.

Noberto,
your children wish you would come in from the garage

They think the refrigerator is singing to them
and have fallen asleep
in the kitchen
dreaming of grocery lists
and those cartons
of cheap cigarettes
you get from
the Indian reservation

Outside,
Clifton is unraveling
out into the boondocks
as a bland band
of branded landscape
hot in gas and coffee

Closer still,
ELI is attending
to a family
as they abscess
in all the moldering homes
of the feeder road
of no phones
of the late shift
swollen and bent
under the pressures
of a huge expanse
of stubborn
southern
night

1.

In moving,
our children will be
tired little agents
of some deceitful
skullduggery

trained
under
the employer
of all our
tight muscles

to be
telepaths
re-imagined
as work

Where
together,
we are
a treacherous thing

of dredged scenery

exploding like steel
in the bellies of trees

And out across their
undergrowth
a rolling debt of infrastructure
inspires complete townships
of sidewalks
and
lazy betrayers

as they sink

deep

into a pink ridge
of chemicals

Where,

oh my,
Miizzzard

we are haunted bodies of
appetites

tangled in a static web
of power lines
who’s transmissions
billow
over the heads
of the ugly children
of a plastic forest

Where
they are
a lull of
joy and madness
sighed just below space
by a suburban hush of
gates
tall in
humid stupor

tired embers
asleep
through waking states
of qualitative happening
only to dream
in terms
of ash

of an ill begotten
owl headed
conjurer
of hammers
plodding out
tributaries of highway
caught cascading
into southern pools of fields

to
collapse
impossibly

into a job

and built there
i find
an expensive
anomaly
of machinery
and
villages

in all their
impossible
opaque
phases

giving purpose
to some of
the strangest
debris

Owls in the Alley : The Roanoke Transmissions

Arrival