Why is it that I only ever notice my gut in motel room mirrors?

Perhaps obesity is contagious in these parts, the natural result

of pride and fear. And why am I not noticed here? Barely

branded by sidelong glances in one dead-eyed town after another

by a populace whose chief talent lies in the ability

to instantly distrust anything they don’t understand.

The feeling is mutual.

I have passed like a ghost through your cities,

scavenging for scraps of the past. I have rambled, ambled,

bled your cities dry, arriving at the end of the trail of trash,

weighed down on the great white way,

on tired streets of dead blood-red brick.

And I have found the old buildings,

in all their purity, perfectly preserved, in paint

on the sides of new buildings

in towns like silences

that need not be filled.

And there is nothing left anywhere

that hasn’t been turned over and undermined

by overawareness. For in this tarnished day and age

the luster of everything must be restored

and celebrated with meat and sugar,

and a soundtrack of feigned emotion.

There’s a lot of ugly laughter in this world:

stranded in other people’s reality;

trapped by freedom and vexed

by pointless innovations in a homogeneity

somehow born of distance and inconsistency.

Discovering myself again

as a useless member of society:

belonging nowhere, only wishing

I wasn’t wishing

I wasn’t here.

Meditating, amid ruins,

upon the ruin of myself,

realizing that the decline of all I hold dear

can be traced to the exact moment

that I first became

aware.