Entropy
Yesterday’s smokestacks are broken
off on today’s ideas. Enter a tired
town like Birmingham (AL) on a Monday
morning at rush hour. The hills
are cobbled with smoke. The other drivers
don’t look at you, and if they did,
you’d wish they didn’t. Not one of them is
going to heaven, but to the same
brown temple with the same
bad lighting.
Even so,
it gets better. For I don’t live here,
I live underneath. Beneath you in the wall where
the roadblocks are all pushed to hell
and so is the crowd. It’s the kind of place where
you can almost hear a conversation upstairs
miles away, and if we lower our voices
enough you might be heard to say, Dave,
take that back.
And I will,
I’ll say Rockville, Bethesda, Marigold,
Disappointment, the Nile, Mississippi, Amazon,
Whodunit, I don’t know, how can you go on
without me, looking like that, Big Muddy,
Tigris-Euphrates, Boxcar, the River, …