The sky a mile wide.
Election Day, sigh.
Revolutionary world.
Off-balance, tilted.
Mammoth Lake mouthwash
bulging the big spin again.
No change ever the same.
Snakes on the highway.
Rumblin'. Slitherin'.
Noise up the road.
Whistling fast & ready.
Loud enough to make
the deaf read the news.
Ghosts of the Civil War.
Blue & Grey visitations
in the shimmering motion
of Max Earnst dreams.
Ghosts of World War Two.
Walking, lost & vacuum Void.
The tundra is boiling,
sidewalks sweating ooze.
The Who-Knows-Sphere.
Just maybe. Maybe.
What will the deaf see?
Holding tin cups
out for their trickle?
Kitchen table tissues
for mom & dad tears.
What's the fear this year?
Anything is nothing down.
Innocence, in big damn debt
to the banks of the Holy Ghost.
Private panels & levers & checkers.
Who wrong & who white, right?
Kissing couches burning, too.
Potato skins of many races
attached to war-blooded skulls.
Drip, drip. Drubbing-a-dud, duh.
No bandages of grafted skin
ever quite the fractal same.
Dumbing down the vote.
Platonic pole star, democracy.
Forming into formlessness.
Effortless action no easy rider.
No free box in the mountains.
No easy surfers in snarled waves.
Not with Max Earnst at Hiroshima
painting bones into patches of flesh.
Dreams of green SUVs
filled with Vietnam dead.
O hillbilly pollster super car
churning up the dust of dunces.
Lacking ever-loving verbs,
lacking the woody words.
I'll vote with a prayer,
do a ghost dance
& leave a lonely sign:
Please do not disturb.
~ Douglas McDaniel
Tolleson, Arizona
