Dirty Mirror

Kidding myself morning after morning, recycling and already older

Aging done and the dust comes pouring out my mouth, nostrils, eyeballs and hair

Every sunrise I stare in the mirror

The resignation maps in as all of this has danced too long in my rhythm

To where there is only standing, shifting inches and promises holding

Misty sand dehydrated plans of withered roots

Reaching figures across evacuated bedrooms and the sentiment of preferable loneliness

The sight of possibility is a twister in the heartland, barometric chaos in Nebraska

Helicopters are the only escape and whirlybirds get flipped like mustangs

Running for their lives as the suburban sprawl creeps West

Knowing the Olive Garden and the Lowes will leave nothing left

For the colts to eat that’s green, just gritty nubs of yellowing gray to clean

The surface until the whole Earth rubs raw against teeth and seeps into the jaw

Wanders through the mandible into the brain, neurons start adapting, the serotonin stops

And the insane becomes sane; the concrete starts looking good to eat

The rocks, the grit and the pasture is a memory of Freudian slips

Beneath the masquerade that younglings ever attended the valley parades

Migrating stallions and broke-back hills, the fishing holes are calling and nothing will

Replace the taste of the snow-melted water or the springs from the depression

Rising out of winter into hearts of common-drink

Bought and sold and the fare to pass is too much for a common-man

The grit blankets the rest; ask a question and the sounds exhaust in the very air consuming them

To traverse from one’s larynx to another’s cochlea; the hammer never rings the anvil

The riders have booted ever stirrup raping the bare skin until normalized

Like parents yelling at drivers ahead for moving too slow so that their engine sits idle

At a traffic light, late for work and child at home for the summer with no one to play with

In another city, days shrinking like raisins bagged up and never eaten

The sit-down cereal milk is rarely poured upon the grain that is grown

The seed has its own commercial genetics and nature has been told to go home

To another planet as if she was a spouse who was told she is no longer welcome in this marriage

Humanity has moved in with our mistress and the kids have come along

Mother is wailing out there in the badlands looking for the heart right now

Slap the water from the sink upon my face; spread this resin texture in my hair

Get through another walking-mummy sequence and pay the price I’ve already paid

The engine starting in the garage questioning pulling out

Earn a living to give it away; see the glow in the others that still have a chance to run

The recognition eludes in the novel of what has not become

The dust-dance with the devils of crackling-romance, the zombie-children of vagabond graves

The highways of Sisyphus-stone Sundays pushing the rock seeing it roll back upon toes

Knowing what comes next as the story goes written before and written again

Sunk in the gut of the difference between real and to pretend

That phone call is going to come; that girl is going to show up

The bicycle won’t have that accident each time the play is rerun

Bent up back from the smashed-in truck, busted teeth and no shrine to build

The blood drains across the sidewalk as the grass covers up the salvageable in a mother’s milk

The front yards of the neighbors arouse with the noise, hear the screaming

To bring their own children inside; to avoid the commotion of another body about to die

The St. Augustine lawn withers in the sun as the whole community turtle-heads-in

Only to see the real estate agents run to some city further and further out

The chasm is quaking as the urban blight eats the stomach out

Of a city like a Somali refuge’s bulging abdomen on a dusty highway

Walking and National Geographic takes a picture for the world to stare

And say, “Ain’t that sad. Here’s a quarter,” as we take a sip of a Bud or a Coke or toke another Marlboro

Man on his horse, lasso and looking the part, rugged and tall, bandana and called

To reign in the grazing lands with fence posts, owned by the bank with God notes

Navaho, Sioux, Cherokee all set to gamble on the science of yellow fever blankets

And bullets against bison and saddled up horse meat

One is one’s purpose fishing the stream, but when the water is gone

Even the fish can be heard screaming stacked like pauper-flapping audience members

To the heated global parade, the paper mill’s poisons dumped rather than caged

The animal’s urine made by a machine, the animal’s breath from a smokestack

The animal’s sight from a camera catching the red-light runners

The animal’s fur falling out foaming on drugs to grow it back

Another to get the blood flowing and the penis on track

Dust-man glaring retinas reflecting the inverse and it could always be worse

Round about mantra echoing in the head, when does the answer comes back

Better off, better off ….

Never