Poem: Next to the 189

 

Next to the 189

 

a chain gang of rumbling metal

roils in a heat-wave rut.

slow slow slow bumper-to-bumper,

this stew of blurry killer gases.

 

carbon silts roofs, cakes cement,

soils the creases of stress masks

on people who rarely have individual faces. 

 

tonly lice-smitten vagrants and their dogs

brave the shoddy sidewalks

while phalanxes of windshields watch,

stoic as visors on the riot helmets of the police.

 

no, 

no faces on anyone here, anymore,

except, yes, the dogs and sometimes the vagrants,

those folks that have no choice but to dare.

 

the rest of us gird ego in shadowy machinery,

eyeballs engulfed in anti-UV plastic.

maybe

 

that scraggle of crows, homesteading on a tower,

hints at something of a tribe.

not so long ago, this land was all tribes.

 

now there are electric grids and phone lines,

where the crows glower like irate mothers

 who that the Jaguars, BMWs and Mercedes consider fools:

 

how dare those lazy birds recline?

are they immigrants or refugees,

wasting our compoundable seconds?

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1/31/24 ...mods

7/26   ... removed a word

7/17 "blurry killer" replaces "global warming"  ... other mods 

7/8 lots of mods for sound and flow and POV

7/7  mods for flow and sound

Inspiration:  overpass between Sylmar and Sunland