On the One-Fifty-Three

Oh Industry. Oh industrious, huddled masses.
of thinly bricked warehouses at dawn, their chipped teeth biting down on persistent, dark night.

Oh Night. Oh loft-for-rent-we-subdivide sign creaking in the wind, unseen behind overtaking brambles, unread, in vain.

Tidy suburbs turn their aluminum backs on barbed wire and metallicized sweat of time time clocks and empty bus depots and parking meters.

America, what of your industry, what of your industrious nature?

loyalty, integrity, sacrifice
exchanged for
convenience, money back and guaranteed?

we've lost our tools, lost our might, lost our fear of God,
time like a tennis ball marks only firm ground between movements,
of sunlit air and wind, in the blink of a century, the first
THUMP
of the assembly lines
bounced
to
wartime manufacturing and
LANDED
hollow, echoed, on the factory room floor.

If a widgit falls in the warehouse and noone is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If a country falls from grace, and noone has the courage to speak it, does it but marr the ground? Show me not your shopping malls or monuments or front rooms. I would like to see the wrong side of the tracks, the billiard parlors and war vet halls, the after-hours, the gang of dogs at the powerlines, what is consciously not remembered and yet refuses to die. what hides in the dusty flint corners of a neatly packaged soul, what still freaks, what forever crumbles, in this denied delapidation, of calloused hands, overalls in the attic,
in dust, in dust, in dust,
of stuttering, staggering, industrial trepidation.