Leaving the factory, lurching home
I studied the streets painted
with the shadows of lesser humans,
as skyfall and low clouds
hung as carcinogenic specters
The wind wasn’t crying for Mary;
it was crying
for more rain.
The houses were stacked as kindling
their occupants lamenting vacuous
about the heat
the economy
what was lacking
and what
they could not control.
Earlier that day
(as the story goes)
she went to the police station
and tried to file an MP report on a corpse
She broke down and said,
My husband’s dead
he’s been murdered
I killed him, I shot him
after he committed suicide.
The uniforms did a follow up
to the home where
they found a body, a small arsenal
the kind used in suburbia
to wage war
against monsters
that never come.
They found the city and her secrets
found a crack in Saturn’s ring,
found the zodiac has no validity,
found a cadre of humanity
screaming that the real enemy
was in the mirror.
What they didn’t find
were the lovelorn,
the lost and the dispossessed
coupling and coping
avoiding themselves and people
by staying home
and making more
people.
But still empty and reaching
pining for something else
than the bare minimum, the mortgage,
and the morass
of a life less traveled
of what they were told
and taught to be
to want and will
until it was time to go back to the heat,
to the hatred of the city’s reflecting pool
its phonescreens, skies and
beyond
Leaving the factory, inching towards home
I was full of wanting
for the girl whose dog died
For the one on the east coast
that kissed me once
and then fell asleeep
As I stood in the Friend Zone,
familiar and fallen
belly flopping, the crinkly ears
and balding pate
were some version of vulnerability
staring as a dejected teenager
mouth agape at apparitions
at the poetry of moving pictures;
at the places my father used to take me;
the places his mind erased for me
That was Night One, anyways
another story for the cache;
genetic napalm for the flames
burning all of us
now.
–2016 El Sereno, CA
Difficult To Cure 
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