Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Prompt #3: Lillie

Of tepees & taxes

It's tax time & my head hurts
while cherry blossoms pop over
Washington, over the heads of men 
who can't even agree how to spend
these monies.  Supposedly, April's
idyllic in the pleasures of unlocking,
from the trees rousing, shaking
sleep from their twigs in the wind
& bursting spring fever out their fingers,
to the squirrels accosting each to each
twitch of one psychotic tail to another,
but I sit here--               stoic--

I had a dream of a vegetable garden
& a tepee on an acre of land
somewhere with no cell phone reception,
then woke to a house that once burned down,
an abeyance of a path behind it to a lake
still moldering in flaked, airy ice crumbling
at the edge.  The neighbor's kid tramps
the white chips with orange Crocs,
a symbol of the tackiness
of modernity & its

form of institutionalized selfishness.
According to a W-2, most
anything can be owned except dreams,
& as I'm busy quantifying my life
here's my son chattering in a blanket
lying, crying in the office
waiting for mommy to finish
this form.

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