another round of blogging: THE SADDEST ZOO IN THE WORLD

Last time we spoke, I was five thousand kilometers to the south surrounded by people I love. This time, I'm in the middle of a California wasteland, alone in an apartment that's an airbnb on the weekends and not much of a home. A place ripped from the 70s, but to which I've added a splash of IKEA, a sprinkle of vintage delish in the way of a rocking couch, and a haphazardly excreted collage that emerged one toasty Sunday with nothing but a horrid frame, a magazine, scissors and some duct tape. Remarkably unoffensive to the eye and reminiscent of things I'd like to forget.

It's not to say there are not some that I love out here among the tumbleweeds, and some others, 100 miles south beside the Big Blue that sparkles starlets' eyes and lures the artists West. Those clusters of beings send wafts of cooling friendship towards the little box with its swirly brown shag and 90+ temperatures.

So, this time, instead of blogging, I'm posting thoughts and poems - yes - out here among the Joshua trees, poetry accounts for midweek nightlife, and I'm glad of that. Poets might not make money, but we can surely try to mint new images, cast in words of odd arrangement that leave a stamp upon the mind - at least I hope.

Here goes:

THE SADDEST ZOO IN THE WORLD

pungent wafts of stale urine:

nostrils recoil

from the assault of clorox

faintly masking humanity's rot

darting eyes assess the horizon

behind black rusted gates

hanging listless in the suffocating dampness

whose fungus crumbles the half-perimeter wall

to which cling metallic vines of fencing

that encircle the colony of the abandoned

the saddest zoo in the world

sits

caged

just past a labyrinth of shacks

that marks the edge of urban life

beyond the fogbank that cloaks the city,

lie those left for dead,

charred by the sun

curled up like withered weeds

on cracked pavement

rhythmic rocking

punctuated by spasms

tied to bed springs and lawn chairs,

or locked in windowless wards,

flooded with feces

bereft of attention,

in the tyrants' domain

subjects of medicine,

specimens

of reason's impotence

they are the abandoned

living

atop a deep ravine

whose gullet belches black waters

and exhales clouds of death

to consume the trembling rags who escape

the chokehold

of armed guards, tranquilizers and tangled wire