Born onto the clock
like we were made to make
in the shrill madness of monotony,
sold to spiteful superiors
simply because we could not afford our own
freedom--
we have all been tricked
by time and dollars
into this grey-dull and deadly dream.

I've been working in an auto salvage
yard, an ugly spread of dirt
where nothing again will ever grow
but where plenty goes to die.
There they crush and crumple
smashed-up cars for recycling, they collect parts
for resale. I have been hired
to walk around in the North Carolina sun
in the fall of summer
and pick up broken parts of automobiles
scattered about the timid mud dirt and muck
and throw them into old junkers
to be carried away to the crusher
so that the wasted ground might be cleared
for more casualties of highway accidents.
There are no miracles to be found
anywhere, you won't
find them,
'cause afterall miracles are just
accidents that work in our favor,
but none of this
seems to have worked out for anybody--
just from the sight of some of the cars
you can tell that nobody walked away
from that one
from this one,
no way. Some of the smashed-ups
have car seats in them,
or stuffed animals
now hurled to the broken floor
and sick with cakes of cold and careless dirt...

it's a strange feeling
to know
that you are picking up the fragmented pieces
of dead people's lives,
especially when the artifacts obviously belonged to children;
it's a bizarre archaeology,
an odd way of collecting pieces of information
about the past, about other people's
lost being,

it's a strange feeling
wondering within the shadow-storm of molecule and mind
through the smog-cough of hangover
and lament
who these people
might have been
what they
might have been like
where they
might have come from
and where they
might have gotten to...
Did they cling too to the false preciousness of possessions
which now lay strewn about the bored ground
like so many other idling idiots
who pollute your asthmatic days?
I's bet you five to one
that they did,
and now the same dirt that collects
under my fingernails
holds up the splintered ideology of their obsessions
while it holds them down
in permanent silence
and disregard.

It is (right now)
November, fall spits its losing of the leaves
upon the collections of dust and debris
that fold flat under our thoughtless feet,
the leaves surrender to brown
as the sky smokes a cigar and laughs,
and I wake up
another day just like the last
Born onto the clock
like I was made to make
in the shrill madness of monotony,
sold to these spiteful superiors
simply because I could not afford my own freedom
when all I want to do
is learn the wise language of stillness--
but we've all been tricked
by time and dollars
into this grey-dull and dubious death of dreaming,
so I attempt to design laughing thoughts
between the legs of my labor...

My first day on the job
I came upon a car smashed all to shit,
destroyed
and expelled from usefulness,
and it looked like the car
of a young girl, at least that's
what it said to me,
and I wondered quietly to myself
if this poor dear
had been able
to walk away.
Then I picked up the bumper
of the car
which was sitting next to it
in the dirt:
it had a bumper sticker
which said: Life Is Good.
I dropped it back down
to the doom of the grey dead ugly floor
of abandoned earth
and began laughing,
out loud,
loudly.
It was a morbid
and angry guffaw,
a simultaneous statement of defeat and victory,
and in that laughter
the hues returned to my inner habitation.

I thought about the dead leaves
on the choked ground, the leaves that still
insisted a beautiful brown,
and I saw how wise they truly were
even in their autumn leaving:

they had let go
of the trees,
they had let go
their grasp on living,
but even
and still then,
there scattered amongst the gloom and gather
of our equivalent lives,
they were more alive
than most of us
have ever
or would ever
dare to be,
as
even in their decay,
even in how horrible everything was,
they had refused to give up on color.

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