Westworld

Written while driving from South Dakota through reservation land in Montana and in taking it all. Through an April winter storm and gas station stops a poem scribbled in between sights seen out the van window. Title given due to traveling West the entire route. 

Westworld

Gray wisps of rain;

Curving curtains around conservative-inhabited vague spaces

Small plots on vast green,

blue and healthy, earthy tan;

Rich, data-depleted interstate street,

Covalent rape-trailer—

Hiding an open secret in rural,

plain sight;

Concentrated, collapsed suburban,

Post-traumatic stress infusion;

Thousand yards staring down—

into blank-face destitution

Dipole-dipped delusion, evading snake-stick,

Pushing prod with a cheap, synthetic leather scent;

Prosthetic parody—

in and out under the clouds:

Stale tasting Starbucks

Queer, once in a moment shitty coffee—

Small-Wall infantry.

butchered strung up to a tree;

Flaying poles dancing—

Murderous, moseying impulse

Wearing out, wondrous new side-route—

New copycat miniature ranch county range,

Free-rein, open carry days:

Small town gossip, glossed over malaise:

Reservation reprehension—

‘stay the fuck away or we’ll kill you’

Repressive, open-range intent,

Free-roam roulette glory hole;

Ozone fusion, chemical dispersion

Sky cleanly cluttered,

and scarcely is there a soul off the road;

Choke-hold latex tether shredded over—

invariable trillions of blades of sharp grass,

Stretched beyond elastic,

strained overstate divides and rung through miles of mud, sun, muck and gorgeous valleys of silent, salient selective serenity;

Bone-laced lines of traveling history,

Battery low and the sun descends West—

as also headed, an un-winnable race,

79 mile an hour pace;

Hate a bitch enough to dig them up and desecrate their face,

Post-mortem parlay—

Wild-West, bleeding gas mileage