Hills of Slag

1/25

Yesterday we were in Jim Thorpe.
We were also in Centralia, among its smoke and mist.
In Pottsville we were at its most silent.
Yesterday we were travelers and we ate cookies well.

*

We don't like sitting in rooms together.
But we do it anyway.
We don't learn from our mistakes
but we don't learn together.

*

I know what I saw.
I saw a cosmic radiance.
I saw the vision of moonshine.
Atop a slag castle, staring through mist.

*

Who would live in a town like Quakake
without hiding bodies
and thanking the rails
for a wonderland of jump pads?

*

No spray, the sign read.
I wanted to dip it in cacao chunks.
I wanted to swallow it all down my tight throat.
No spray, the sign read.

*

1/26

I remember Ron
who stood at the bar at M & M's
in downtown Pottsville.
He gave us so many beer tokens.

*

Also at that bar
which played strictly its club rap,
bologna from Jerusalem was the bar food
and we got free red and white plastic mugs.

*

Centralia's dusty paths
were the black backs of wyrms.
We road them and snused.
I puffed too and tried to forget her.

*

I am the robot king! I shouted.
My lazers are the fastest.
My armor the thickest.
My processor a blitzer.

*

So I'm in wait for the principal.
Plans fail. I repeat: fail fail fail.
There was once a metal army.
The nuke glued their shadows down like Hiroshima.

*

His voice was the sound of a guitar.
His mood was a flopping soggy roast beef hoagie.
I could put him between two pieces of toast
and ship him to the Emperors in Antarctica.

*

Today there's goulash and tomomrrow, Let's Go!
There is pending parental supervision.
Sitting makes us go crazy.
Bees go crazy when they're on a fence in front of a cave.

*

Ms. S. and I chatted Stenton Park
and Old Stenton Road and Logan Station.
She accused me of email viruses, and
after I mentioned Centralia, trees fell.

*

Chris and Carry are bright and merry.
They keep up talking about stuff
no one I know would follow.
Such fabulous knowledge the oppressed have prepped.

*

A carrot that's mine; and a brownie, a cookie: both Kyle's.
A swig of tap water. Phiadelphia's.
Danea's coffee. Down this hatch or that.
I'm still yearning for more fucking fruits and veggies.

*

So Yossarian gets visited by his fam.
They don't remember his name.
They care and he doesn't.
Nothing matters and that's that.

*

Berryman's Dream Songs failed and duh.
It's like this cat playing with a dead mouse.
But there are hundreds of dead mice and only one cat.
No one wants to see it go down like that.

*

I haven't driven a Creeley poem in a while.
Maybe because I'm afraid of the road.
Maybe the turns are too dangerous for me.
Or maybe I'm thinking of Penelope Creeley in Providence.