My return to the den of bullhorn voices
is marked by the incoming call tone
which I have pegged as a clean C sharp.
I imagine my life in a minor key
at a tempo that echoes the second hand,
cruel in its persistence.

The scheduling clerk tapes her excessively
l       o       n       g             acrylic nails
in slow succession on her laminate desktop.
They are airbrushed with beach scenes
that she considers fine art.
This tapping habit is as close to the beach
and quiet contemplation as she gets.

The broad women of the front office
are broadcasting their personal lives
in their own urban language.
My brain had been numbed by inanity.

The nurses all wear brightly-colored scrub tops
patterned with trademarked cartoon characters.
  The patients are not comforted.
We hold our breath through the waiting room,
wading through air thick with communicable diseases
and the aura of odor that attends the homeless
and the hapless victims of poverty.

I have passed this place once in the dead of night.
It looked something like a wedding cake under floodlights.
  But you cannot trust your memory of the night in this place
  where morning conversation revolves around last night's violence.
  Poverty is ever-present, a crime perpetrated perpetuated by society
  consumed with preservation of structure, not life. 

Too hot to rain, the air is dense today.
I feel as if I could scoop it up in armfuls,
carrying it along to suffocate my ponderings.
The soupy sky hangs nearer my reach than ever
but contains nothing to pluck from its infinity.
It is monochrome and simple as a clean slate,
an empty canvass so deceptively full.

The white noise of the interstate is all-pervading
though dampened by particulate-thick air
that shrouds the flood basin and blue-distant Knobs
as if this place were dead already instead of dying.

I stick to my seat, decline air conditioning
in favor of downed windows and speed,
leaving the work week behind me
to decay in memory.

01/07/2007

Author's Note: This work is a distillation of seven separate pieces I wrote during "The One Week Challenge" in July of 2006. The one week challenge is an excersize in which a friend and I challenged ourselved to write one semi-autobiographical poem each day for an entire week. Line 30 was written as a criticism in response to the millions of dollars invested to save and rennovate the old Marine Hospital on I-64 in Louisville, KY (an undoubtedly worthy cause) while the downtrodden residents of the surrounding area are denied funding for basic services like medical care. That is the structure I originally alluded to. I only realized after the fact that the line could also be taken to mean societal structure in a more figurative sense.

Posted on 01/07/2007
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