Tales from the Metropolitan Outskirts

I. (Greenville TX)

My McCafe is getting quite cool.
I am not convinced I added enough sugar.
It is no matter.
Given the wifi and the app for that
I will hardly remember to finish drinking it.

I pity the manager on his cell phone
With 4:30 call times and tension in his voice.
He does not love what he does- who would?
The difference is that most never hit actualization-
Never look past the highway and the fields
Away from the hamburgers and the cheap ice cream
And understand that America is dying.

II. (Paris TX)

The loop of concrete is needless.
What is to encircle when the money is gone?
When the streets are empty and powerless?
The nearest dose of intellect is either among the houses
Or far away in a distant land.

If the interstate system is a bloodstream
Delivering the economy and the culture
To the empty places of the outside
Then I have found a place truly void
Not only from the 3G network
But from everything.

How many artists are hiding among the trees?
Are they merely an illusion?

III. (Commerce TX)

A half-home is a terrible predicament.
How comfortable can you be
When you know this is not your dream manifest?

I have no comprehension of a life outside
Of the center of the heart.
The absence of a good bag of coffee
Is representative of a much larger problem
As I eviscerate store after miserable store
In search of the ingredients
For happiness.

IV. (Stillwater, OK)
An entire world is merely one tank of gas away,
A dot on a map, a couch or a bed, a condom.
Given a job and a lease on some friends,
I could sink into the woodwork and stay here forever.

The daylight is warm and the evenings warmer still:
We become the ones that forsake circadian silence,
Not shuffling through the oppression of our fathers
But dancing in the cracks between the nation's memes.

The fears, however, are the same.
The money and the shady danger are the same.
The man that follows you home and shatters your buzz
Will reduce only at a broken piece of glass.

The palpable white walls, akin to a flat in some distant land,
And the gentle guitar pouring from the next wall over
Speak to us while we shower together
And I ponder the word 'home'.