i guess it's about six or seven
when i pull into the parking lot
and the sky itself seems reluctant to submit
to this radioactive sunset that casts the whole evening
in a smoky yellow whisper.

the spaces are sporadically occupied
by some SUVs and a few other nondescript automobiles
of the varieties that blur together in the back of your mind
(like infinite reiterations of the same grayish nothing,
melting into themselves and one another until they spill over
into something of an amorphous mass of metal and rubber
that no poet or thief has yet cared enough to describe)

and there's an old man here.
hard to say how long that's been true.
he's aged somewhere between the twilight of human existence
and the quiet chaos of self-perpetuating half-truths
about the nature of reincarnation.
he's pushing a series of rusted shopping carts,
each with a broken wheel in the same corresponding location,
allowing for the visibly awkward angle of his exertions.
he's got this ragged, barely-held-together,
might-once-have-been-blue los angeles dodgers cap on,
which he nonchalantly pulls down low to obscure a withered face;
thinking, perhaps, his threadbare tangle of brim and nylon
a finer relic of bygone days than its owner.

he navigates thoughtlessly through the ebb and flow
of traffic on the murky blacktop ocean, appearing
no more concerned about the proximity of islands for his carts
than the cosmic chokehold of preconceived judgments on the lot--

this pollution,
which has billowed out of cracked-open car windows
(and filtered through a cacophony of fanfares from warring stereos)
has spewed forth for what could well be decades by now--
the after-effect of clandestine prejudice
from every ill-tempered and ill-informed god complex
that has ever matched my own.

10/01/2010

Author's Note:
I keep deleting this and reposting it because it never sounds right.
I read somewhere that there is no such thing as a completed poem--only an abandoned one.
This is my last time; I am just gonna let it go.

Posted on 10/01/2010
Copyright © 2024 V. Blake