Acceptable Dissociations

1 Meanwhile the expressway’s hum, it roars into Her, the expressway cargo and tree-lined, stretched Radio towers, mowers its horns and hogs, its beef And bread vans, hour after hour, laptop, radar Detectors from New Mexico, Idaho potatoes, HoHos And Cheetos, all organic grain-fed, pieces of chicken, Pieces of cow, slices of pig, kernals of corn, diced carrot, All packaged meals, she of drums, her mile after mile Of interchange escape into itself rest stop, progress Is welcoming and bidding adieu, states drinking Her progress, passing tolls, Motel 6 she hum as glass And EconoLodge, passing itself traces of Ashland And Peoria, Willingboro, Paterson, every inch of it grafted, Numbered, planted, barriered, mowed, guardrailed, O my citizen consumers, for the time, infinite, Replaceable, scaling these walls of sound and motion, Dipping in, expressing oneself, expressing oneself, Expressing oneself. 2 Wonder warships at citizens in blue, the number Lining the leaf, infinite expressways, and scaling Blood, soil a Camden, shouting over water Sunday Steel passing the in and sky noise, another abandoned By of one to mills, at steel, above bone, gazing (euphoria, Nostalgia!) citizens, up leaf, citizens, wonder! Infinite warships Sunday and abandoned a shouting expressways, noise, Across in blood, steel, lining passing bone, at gazing Blue mills, scaling the water another number to in The above soil by of steel up one and sky at the Over Camden, citizens, euphoria nostalgia! All along the avenue spronging, tent-like, their attitudes Way ahead of them. My computer screen, waving.Where Is your horse? she said, and there was nothing I could say. What I want is generally tidy. What I get often can’t dance. What wants a date who can’t dance? Who wants a line without rhythm? Who wants a line without thought? 3 Occasionally there is anger. Occasionally she takes her one good foot and applies it to surfaces otherwise flat and safe, the expressway progressing itself through her, expressly. (I live here because the country I once lived in is now a corporate washroom, where there were once gardens now oil refineries turn night into day and farmers into militiamen—you won’t even understand this, and your teeth gleam!) Once again the feeling comes, like a sprong in the groin, an abundance of feeling that is sharp, almost hostile in its need to overtake. Several women in pink felt it coming. They turned, their pierced ears like arrows in her thigh. Sprong, sarong. I ask you? Over the course of several weeks developers wiped out all the trees in a town in A to avoid having them designated as essential sites after a rare woodpecker was found to be nesting in the town. Woodpeckers are not essential. Trees are not essential. Trees are ornamental. Humanity is ornamental. Prophet is everything. This poem resembles urban sprawl. This poem resembles the freedom to charge a fee. The fee occurs in the gaps. It is an event. It is not without precedent. It is a moment in which you pay money. It is a tribute to freedom of choice. Reality is a parking lot in Qatar. Reality is an airstrip in Malawi. Meanwhile the expressway encloses, the expressway round and around the perimeters like wagon trains circling the bonfire, all of them, guns pointed, Busby Berkeley in the night sky.