There’s a half-empty bottle of Snapple on the desk

Love is vicious

Love is calm

Love is everywhere

And yet so distant

In a world gone wrong

Star maps line the walls

Prescription bottles are collected on shelves

Outside the sun is blazing

Inside the time is draining

Me

This idle specimen

I feel locked down and distraught

Caught in a glimpse of stop-action motion

The farm cries

The fields call

Mountains sprawl

Rivers run

The highways hum with moving life

And I breathe strife

Poems penned by madmen

Are better than this

The words slip through my fingers

I cannot hold onto them

The words are clogged in my mind

Blockades are not kind

The potato man looks up in the sky at the red airplane

He worries about the bills back home gathering dust

He looks down the barrel of the future

Something backfires

Charcoal briquets aflame

The ancient sounds of a Midwestern fry out

The gleaming porcelain of bubblers slick with champagne

Let it go…

Worry, pain, disgrace

Envy, regret, mistakes

All the tumbles and falls

All the derailments

Books collected on the walls

How do they do it?

All those words

All those worlds

And I can barely scratch a thought

It brings me down

Like a sad clown

Silly phrases that amount to nothing

AI resistant

The checkout line is stuffed with rude fools

Life is draining away in an hourglass

The bottle of Snapple on the desk is drained and dead.

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