Vacations from wrathtown

April 2023

Douglas Olds, all rights reserved

Into the car lot of claptrap’s steepled beaker 

I roll  And blare my horn

Leavening the town with dissonance added to thymic dissonance

My palm pressing the steering wheel's center like kneading out dough

Its shofar of disgust bleating at mongrel hegemony dressed in the cool fine fiber of his neighbors,

That these walled tombs of beguiled, toothy comportment may come crumbling down

These rod-bearers of spittling rage, froth-flecked and bullet toting broadcasts of catastrophe 

Past-entrapped, neighborhood destroying implants, statues of majesty posed amid ambients of haste, 

their imperturbable gaze like Rodin’s immortalized Balzac 

Guaranteed by a phallus-grasped gun concealed under unflappable cloaks of lies.

For all who ignore such righteous members: Oh how the seven-masted wolf will set sail to sing again of its most excellent spear that suckles steel!

Would rather Snow paint its settlement on my ascent to reverse: soft, still, silencing amplitudes of variety

To cool and sift these strange distempers.

I look around at my town graced with new and old, the decent all kinds swimming deep and oblivious to the surface rage

Householding their schools far from the banks

In flows of destiny’s poetry tending ever to the quiet swells of Creation, its exits ever followed and entranced.

Escape festivals unlocking garishly camouflaged

Histories of the beast’s retrieval

ruminate not on shame Recollect memory’s lathe, 

Retool anima rusticating not the leisured bovine gibbet of resentment’s cud and curd

Let instead the grape in assemblies of keening grace Ferment, the bread of novelty’s grain baked to ripple the coruscate tongue of our times,

 the aromas of nature’s hearth released to lure the claptrapped

To crunch out arts’ marrow by ear and eye to swallow it deeply in muscle and bone for powers that build rather than tear.

Awakening us from our combative reveries against the implanted angel’s sword which stays our plans from ancient Eden’s retrieval.