prayers for meatwagons

prayers for meatwagons

prayers for meatwagons prayers from meatwagons too:

things can happen in intersections aspeed

with two ambulances from separate streets.

 

one victim here the survivor of a crash

that took the lives of a family of five―

he and his driver never knew what hit them.

 

the victim from the second ambulance died

almost as much from his gunshot wounds―he'd just

said he'd like to kill the fellow that shot him.

 

the surviving ambulance driver recalled

having to shout “imbeciles! out of the way!”

 

quiet physics

in the quiet physics of this room bright light

slices through shutters' slits angled to the sun

eight bands of light I decorate with smoke swirls

 

spinning vortices of vanities exhaled―

not much in and of itself but a display

illustrating these planes of nothing but light

 

from only that sun with only thin grey smoke:

a conjured model of galaxies aspin

turning themselves diffuse into tranquil air:

 

dispersing splintered dispersed once moments pass

the room soon hangs in an evenly spread haze.

 

hendecasyllabic trajectory

publishers afflict us with irony, too

(ironies can only be hoarded so long):

of Zamyatin's dystopia we might get

 

a utopian edition's proofread prose

with no pages missing and none printed twice:

the square root of negative one in the text

 

deserves its mention in the text column, not

in the page numbers on the bottom or top―

if publishers loved Zamyatin they would heed.

 

(of publishers absurdists are heedless, not

by innumeracy but trajectory.)