Road Trip

The Easterner

“The furnace-brain of a demon king

Sleeps under the Rockies’ insect wing

In columns of water erupt its young

Highways unroll like its fetid tongue

‘Cross plains caked in snow like molted skin

Through states we could only have earned for sin

Through empty fields and belching gas

From rendering plants at every pass

Where they butcher hogs and melt them down

And serve them at each poky town.

“Didn’t you sense the well-earned hate

Breathed from every fast-food plate?

From farm-kids and locals who lost their lands

To distant, Eastern, burnished hands?

And less deserved, the hatred dripped

From the local gentry’s mottled lips.

Weren’t you left in fearful daze

By his wheezing joke about ‘the gays’?

You thought he’d ground his final axe

‘Till he got going on ‘the blacks.’

“The highway arrives at an urban place

And the demon reveals its nether face

A burg which grins through skyscraper teeth

Treading evils underneath

And howling cold like stinking breath

Bears smells of striving, grasping death

It lords over Chicago’s impotency

In the face of coal-fired misery.

“What bugs you are! -- you choose to reside

On this demon’s pock-marked country hide

Where monster lakes breathe swirling storms

And mountains spit on huddled forms.

Didn’t Lindsay or Sandburg or ol’ Guthrie

Or any beloved plainsman see

The horrors prepared for ‘the people, we’

In these man- and God-forged factories?

Gall makes each sainted bard a liar

‘This land’ scalds with cold; it chills with fire.”

*****

The Westerner

“Sure-- but tell me true you didn’t feel

When Dakota winds bit at your heel

A passion through your body steal--

Some slumbering, resented patriot zeal.

Didn’t you see the demon-grin sag

At the signs of life in its bitten crags?

Or see the storm-clouds blushing beat

A sullen, sour, chaste retreat?

You fancy in urban cubby-holes

You’re as safe but not as blind as moles

But your Beacon Hill gives paltry light

It breathes not our Western fierce delight

For in Boston you have such sins as we

More, some say, uncharitably

What's more: you lack the cherished sight

Of time and space to set things right.