On the fabricated grid, just off the short end of the bus,
Indian School Road and Maryvale Avenue,
lined with tax shops, banged-up beige storefronts,
Taco-Laying the sidewalks, burgered down beings,
former kings on faraway continents covered with trees,
now hunkering down in parking lots shadeless and mean,
gun shots firing at dusk, black iron bars harboring tires,
shower installment windows, cement suckered to grease,
roving brigades of police making sure no one makes too much
of the shade, restricted to the corners of bus stops to get their G.
They cut down the palms so the homeless won't go dark on them,
kept in the heat by the silent, secret agents of neglect.
Gas and cash with Dinocare, the jungle ether of the Valley
humming up monoxides, twenty-four-seven sugar coated
candy superstores are enlarging, largening, monstering
up the beef, the thirst, for another gallon in the trailer park
lined with beaten old relics from maybe World War Two
as Vietnamese-blasted wheelchair riders bleed from the VA.
Runover Santas, dead-dreaming their dranos due to Agent Orange,
Gulf War drones before there were drones, all systems down,broken arrows all, sneaking for space between the tall bank towers,
buzzing in beer, buzzing out wine: What the hell is manna, O mama,
what the hell is a Carniceria when pushing a basket of your booty?
Meanwhile, at the Free Clinic, God's children, saved by Obama
and a single vote by John McCain, are limping toward the door,
refugee-looking people popping from in and out of the miasma,
cut in the drain of the white-flash sky, the cut of the winds,
sweating like sherpas in a sandstorm, looking like clowns
kicked out of the circus, with hope left only for bottomless coffee,
endless sugar & cream, drinking furiously the liquid candy bars
but they stop because there's a fight going on,
two oddly dressed women, one in a fiery red cap,
striped gremlin stockings, another a collection of ripped-Ts,
can't be kept from each other, large as any other in the lobby,
taking punches, swinging wild flailing fat wings, taking it outside,
as the staff and security dude are vacuumed out into the street,
rushing out the door in Code Blue intentions, pulling them apart,
a small crowd of haunted souls in one-hundred-ten-degree heat
spinning in the contagion as somebody cries out,
"Hey, does anybody here know the coffee is decaffeinated?"
but we are all addicts here as big Luna sings a Spanish song.
Another bus stop for words: Black man drinking a beer.
"Breakfast of Champions," he says, just as two "occifers,"
black-blue shirts, pants, glitter and stripes & holy phones
hooked into the panopticon, move in like Batman & Robin:
"It's only a misdemeanor," says one as the cuffs are locked,
as loads of trucks pass by, no escape available,
too far to walk away from the phony structures
bleaching out in eternal light, a perfected dark,
as the big boxes glow in the sun & napalm heat islands
of civic design encase us in the fabricated matrix of desire.
~ Douglas McDaniel
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