new poem 4.16.2011

work, the subshop, the grocery store,

wherever I am I’m always thinking about being somewhere else

like a young woman working a cash register, I smile until the customer stops looking,

until the apple orchard is naked and dried up, until it’s stripped bulldozed rebuilt

into a strip mall with a larger than necessary parking lot

SPACE

which is what this is really about not the final frontier,

but the amount of volume I take up, and while I push

it doesn’t push back, like a lead exit door welded shut