Never too Far

When it crosses my mind that I have not learned a thing at work

In five years it makes me feel like death is right there laughing

Over my shoulder, to my side, bedding in the curve of my cheeks

We never get too far from each other  

At the grocery with the bell peppers, celery and onions

Mixed among the Gulf shrimp plopped there on ice with bulging black eyeballs

The feeler-whiskers extended often detached

The Croatian grandmother behind the counter with her gloves and tales of St. Bernard Parish 

The pines of this place further elevated and suburban

The satellite gray dishes yearning longingly at the sky between precipitation for dominance

Retirees walk border-collie’s with no sheep to herd,

Just tall grass for the rodents in the unsold lots  

The interstate truckers hustling up contraband and cargo containers of future

Boxed up and in and never to be seen again in this town

Off to Houston, Memphis or New Orleans peddling for production

Away with a ham steak stop with the mashed potato plates  

Of cigarette stockpiles and barter motels for the confines of an eighteen-wheeler cab

Keep the parking lot lights in yellow-brown monotony bartering with the moon for supremacy

Roll the fog in the morn with the gray-dogs rallied with the symbiotic vagabonds

Huddled under the overpass, one for a chance at food the other protection in the darkness  

A partner from the police officers clawing out the mushed-men separating the driftwood

From the marketable lumber to frame homes on site delivered to order with tags

Start my car always put the garage door up before cranking the engine

Come into work thirty-two minutes tardy as a normality, self-destructive giddy-laugh 

Under my breath as if someone else will offer me the excuse after the remainder of the threads

Unravel at my desk, plastered like the papers scanned into servers for digital memories

Pictures of a daughter like Homer Simpsons sign do it for her, and even those lines blur

The days of unseen or unfelt and un-retorted reckoning bombastic silence 

I return past the cradles of highway theater pull in the garage

iPod playlists like serial-killer prevention radio that there are voices speaking

Not just inside my head like a schizophrenic-comedy hour cast of characters

From Woody Guthrie, Sam Cooke, Miles Davis, and Joe Strummer sitting  

On the Mount Rushmore of ghostly barstools telling me how it is

Death is smoking a piece of broccoli lit right up with a green bush in his teeth

Laughing at the seriousness of assumptions and the wants of the notions

Of loneliness, desperation and our definitions of lost