Small Government
       

For instance, the sheen of headlights on a wet freeway
or a skunk hunkered in its burrow as the pinelands
shrink around it. Things exhibit de facto suffering
whenever you turn away from them, like that hammer
from your father's hand or the glass factory
sure of repeated blows from within. Turn back the clock,
the cloak and stagger. By now it's late,
too late for plate tectonics to save us from our lesser
natures, erecting cornfields between warring factions
or swallowing the acid rhetoric of an ocean,
any ocean with its plastic sheen and sinkhole interior,
its flotsam of made-in-China ducks and water pistols
loosed from a storm-knocked ship to circumnavigate
the globe at bath-time, little friend. What we have here
is a conspiracy against suffering, what we have here is
a declarative sentence with an election to swing. It takes
only two or three furnaces to turn the pinelands into
coke and/or whiskey bottles and/if gazing by an open window,
fewer the foundries of original intent. Father, I lost
the hammer and the appetite, it was I stole your cigarettes
your Buffalo nickels, we got marathon bars for them
father, packs of Topps, mouths of smoke and gum ...
Through which time the freeway thrumming, through which
loophole blue whales in their burrows, the glistening fenders,
quick glances lengthening in the windshield of tinted glass
because looking is a form of longing, in the end.
For instance, a blowhole, a sand flea, that silly putty smirk
you wear in the checkout line while having a nice day.
If not the stench of having rolled through county
after county awakening once more to its factory consent.

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Copyright © 2012 Kevin J. Craft All rights reserved
from West Branch
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission