Gleaners of Couth.
Bootlickers forsooth.
Like Fruit Flies clad
in bad Italian leather.
Buzzing all around,
lost and found among
the pounds of sturgeon roe
and sounds of clinking glass.
Abounding, crass and slinking
mass of Dilettantes.
Lacking any class and
running low on gas.
Their hands, soft and
manicured, grab anxiously
for one more feel, and
one more feel again.
And once again. And then,
the Cocktail Party wends
to its stale and dreary End.
"Say friend, I knew You when!"
Rooted under asphalt and buckling sidewalks,
trees barely budding cast their spindly shadows upon
red brick fronts and gingerbread window casements,
false balconies and granite lintels arching over
heavy wooden doors... The view from the laundromat.
Behind these doors and down narrow hallways,
dimly lit, anonymous lives come and go.
Men and women doing business. Outside, their cars
jam every parking space... while heavy traffic
eases its way through veins of pavement.
This creeping path, through undergrowth and overpass,
cuts old neighborhoods into patchworks of What?
Dogs walking people. Messy birds, whining planes,
screeching trucks, and scrambled brains.
This quickening pace barely leaves space to spare.
And there I sit on a stoop waiting for my wash.
Coveting no one's lot, I am squatting in the dust.
No plot to call my own... feeling like driftwood,
caught on seaweed, stuck in Shorewood, WI.
Don't want to stay put. Wary of moving on.
Breaking Stone bodies,
splitting hairs (thickly matted)
earthling, (fe)male, tomentose;
dosed with hummingbirds
and Words :
small, hovering, illusive.
Though your cottage cheese
and tomato catsup claws
stretch to Heartland,
scratching out Innocents;
though the Lowered Voices of
Quislings unleash
the Terror of Bullets
( the Rapist meant well )
... yet shall our Eyes
hound you to the grave,
and tamp down
the steaming Earth.