the specials are worth perusing...

photo by Jan Herman ©

because of big oil, picture glass, paper menus, jumping jack-o-lanterns and other roadside eateries…

I am a gourd palace journeyman

and I have long abandoned

my dreams of a midnight wheel

to become a semi-affixed regular

at a chrome metal house of decay

awning poems into every food stand

serving hamburgers and hot dogs

made out of stardust, here in America

if it’s not cut down and rusting

in flickering neon wanting

I am uncomfortable

in this land of big signs

I become little furies

turn them into 

determinate causes

other tidal waves

of ignorance 

coasting around the bend

thumbed torrents of texts

in a calligraphy that says

mystical things not served

you need not ask

for them

the television keeps saying

to fornicate with kindness sleeping

Love here, it says, can be picked apart

it is best behind closed doors

and paid for up front

I have made

administratively poor judgment

into my clothes, identifying

all of your expected

customary behaviors of me

and I have finger chained myself

to an assignment of letters

and keys, keeping the driving

in something else’s hands

the simple massage

mass denials to everything

sneaked in with the tolls

with pain in the seeds

and the manufacturing claims

kneading new and improved

before I was even born

to a billable birth certificate

with re-chargeable hubris

modifications and allocations

of my soul

allow me to color

outside of things

I keep finding

patterns in the white noise

just to please acted outcomes

curtain-ing theater portholes

with memory shaved into piles

whittled down, filed away

for less than earnest

but close to the center

of a dark hearted marksmanship

William Tell says keep quiet

and I do

today, I hear the hoarfrost

morning matte-paint about

it is moaning radial arm length

with words like, particulates,

catch the ice, and each dendrite

blooms for a piece of the Dawn

jesters are posing as every jesus

camping out by the last remaining

blue mail box here in America

its slot metal eyes waiting

to see who I might post myself off to

who I might stamp myself to

waiting to see if I am picked clean

of any bones of knowledge

will I crawl instinctively

through the processes

of diminishing reverence

and articulation

for mirrors

and things

foretold in them

are mouths, merely gates

sometimes fleshed

in a disguise of lips

knowing only dictionaries

and the other sides

of laughter sometimes

when the wine is right

in this land dissected with asphalt

I am literally flung across the stars

with all that I want including respite

scooped up by time and made to eat

my humanity in wafer thin tablatures

sometimes I even like eating here

especially when the fries are fresh

and the night’s hunger

doesn’t seem such an endless rest

letting the morning symphony

stick around, to stretch its legs

to move me, for a bit

EJR ©