Exurban
Reverie
(to A.M. Sullivan)
A lost day pinks the tops of black-gray clouds.
A hidden plane glides over cotton candy.
A car roars by erupting blues: bright loud
guitar’s staccato wailing Stormy Monday
can’t change the Friday blossoming overhead.
The weekend lifts on wings of quick and lazy,
an empty path between two empty fields.
Weeks are the seeds of years of dusty yield.
The Park-and-Rides and strip malls lift their lamps
above the wretched refuse of fast-food cartons
that blow like leaves through parking lots where lumps
of plastic cars bear lumps of plastic humans
past panels of smiling faces like postage stamps
in ads for expensive clothing, sheddable skins
of drab reptilian nomads from matchbox homes
to cookie-cutter jobs for vacuous dreams.
Their spawnlings sprain their thumbs on controllers and phones,
glazed faces drugged with flashing lights and noise.
Their mates climb into booths to deepen tans
proclaiming health, relieve themselves with toys,
and watch a nightly parade of braying buffoons
pretend a shiny life for reality shows.
Sleep from a pill brings a shadow of release
to dreams of claws that clack in shadowy seas.
When not enough's enough to spill the time
from cup to gravelled dirt, the spirit writhes,
impaled on emptiness, the waiting tomb
becomes a cavern of chance, of glittering lives
of possibility beyond the numb
and sated thing of now, and who believes
in seeds of some redemption can embrace
the skeleton behind the smiling face,
hop backwards on his horse and continue the race.
Bio: JBMulligan has had more than 1000 poems and stories in various magazines over the past 40 years, and has had two chapbooks published: The Stations of the Cross and THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, as well as 2 e-books, The City Of Now And Then, and A Book of Psalms. He has appeared in several anthologies, including Inside/Out: A Gathering Of Poets; The Irreal Reader (Cafe Irreal); and multiple volumes of Reflections on a Blue Planet.
Tags:
Poetry