The Great Plains
(Feel Good Now!)
“Feel good now ”
Said the street preacher .
Look in the dark
At the lost boys
Hiding in the tree bark.
Layer upon layer
Of tramped dirt divorces.
Buffalo breath on weeds
Sprayed over suburban lawns
Time compresses collapsing
Gothic towers in to wounds
On the plains where the mall
Now stands.
“Feel good now!”
Say the gathered savages
Who rise in the ravages
Of the Grasslands and stretch
And yawn and feel in their pockets
For guns and cudgels.
Green elbows its way above concrete
As the great herds pass
Shot from trains
By drunks from the east
The Falling and rotting
Apocalyptic masses are made of
gelatinous
brown and matted carcasses
On Route 66 .
“Feel good now!”
Said without saying how.
The parade of salted nuts
And cigarette butts
Bouncing in the side of mouths
Twisted in to a river of wrinkles.
Clouds of moths
Swirling and dropping in sprinkles
Drug stores and ‘what Fors’
Burn in underground wells
Chlorine deals run over
Shimmering wheat fields
Never to be seen again.
“Feel good now!”
Twinkies drowned in tequila
The spirit wanders and the body forgets.
About the fascination with the pure
And the series of lost bets.
The telltale signs
Are there in the deer blinds
Breaking the skin
The pain pooling outward
Putting every action in to binds.
“Feel good now!”
Said the gut shot
Taxi driver
Who can’t feel a thing
But that dizzy polyglot,time
The smell of singed hair
Is in the air
And it settles in pieces everywhere.
Joshua Kight 3/28/15