Displaced Persons Poem

Badly tick-covered, like a Life Saver in the mulch,

A guy in a box and myself dusted off down to our cuffs.

The cameras were all secure up in the trees — weird surveillance.

Some limbs leaned over the railroad track; the city didn’t care.

He tripped over a divot left by cheap golfers from the nuclear age;

it was supposed to be so enticing and randy; you should’ve seen the cowboys

we were promised over the lighter fluid and recommendation letters.

Potato chip oil in barrels welded shut in rows on rows, neatly numbered

and accounted for like on a submarine during peace time,

grey steaks of identical shape, their frost sticking the stack together

like Legos left out all night for preservative purposes.

Manicured hair seen from afar through phone-booth glass

like an example in a book stupidly titled The Art of Seeing,

as if anybody had a use for that old thing,

or if common sense weren’t just that

— loosed about hen house sorting itself out just so.