'neath urban volcano
molten words swirl reverse clockwise
spindley legs, psychadelic menage
urban decay, mix, stop
urban candour, too high yellow shorts
and a brown haggard slop bucket
12 beat up and down chevys hitched
to it, long gangly tubes drinking
oil and souls with a fervor thats almost like an enigma
almost like a cardboard cut-out chaplin
spitting a fine, ground up sermon
onto the TV carcass, into the deluge of hopefuls
hoping for dim wittedness, endless bureaucracy
a plague of well-intentioned lies and stabs
which punch through the esophagus like,
the most grime-plumed vector of smoke,
drinking the musty river into one's piteous organs
saliva creased, seeming invisible in one's
agape, writhing jaws, waiting humbly
but stupidly, so stupidly to spit upon this wildly innovative convention
but unable, unflagging, black
listed and torn, torn, swimming for life
in a petrolium undercurrent
holding numbered flash cards aloft in the heavy, sticky air
like unraveled shields, unable to fend
the most obscure cretin, learned but
simply unlearned, the silve-haired
Boo Radley types with dreams of long un-manned
forests and unkempt Trotsky beards.
Drink up the mescal Johns, these
blurs of solitude might preserve
the fossil of our bullshit in a dense,
filthy amber for children to unearth and
mistake for the ruins of their old town.