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

 silts roofs with carbon, 

cakes cement with grime,

soils the creases of the stressful masks

worn by people who rarely ever have 

an individual face,

 

for in the well-off neighborhood

around the the 189,

only vagrants and their dogs

brave the trash-dimpled sidewalks.

phalanxes of windshields watch them,

stoic as visors on the riot helmets of police.

 

no one is else is outside a car.

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 shadowy,

tucked in the ego of machinery,

eyeballs engulfed in UV plastic.

maybe

 

a scraggle of crows, 

homesteading on a phone 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 crows glower like irate mothers

 at the Jaguars, BMWs and Mercedes 

which consider them not at all,

except once in a long while, to say:

 

how dare those lazy birds recline?

are they immigrants or refugees

wasting my compoundable seconds?

=======================================================

7/23/25 big mods 

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