Low Key Day

Quiet, sunny, and unhurried,
But it’s easy to imagine
Something awful happening here.

The sign above Judd’s Auto reads,
Lotto Ammo Guns Beer. Gotta
Pay my Stupid Tax, jokes the man

Buying scratch-offs at the counter.
One of the women who works here
Holds the door for another man

On crutches who’s just bought himself
A couple of cans of Monster.
Under their similar skins

And easy trust in each other,
Something watches out from cover.

Demos Agonistes

What if it just breaks?
It probably won’t

Vanish overnight.
Monarchy rusted

Slowly in its links,
Taking centuries

To break a system
Of lines of descent

That millenniums
Had forged from chieftains.

Even today’s world
Holds scattered monarchs.

If democracy,
With its assumptions

Of equality—
Individual,

Mathematical,
Indivisible—

In voters, and trust
In counting ballots,

Broke into fragments,
Shattered samples still

Would likely linger
On for centuries.

How long they lingered,
Like lingering kings,

Might depend on how
Quickly contenders

Other than tyrants
Or mob rebellions

Entered the scene.
Without the model

Of democracy,
Hereditary

Monarchy might still
Totter in its chains.

Perhaps one-party
Bureaucracies lurk

Like dark furniture
In curtained futures,

Ominous shadows
To blunder into,

But they’re no models
For novel systems.

Right now, there are none.
Democracy sways

As royal houses,
Constrained, entangled,

Swayed, bound and fettered,
Lacking a better

Frame mythology
For social order.

If there’s an idea,
A better idea,

Its hasn’t appeared
To have escaped yet.

That Won’t Happen

Well, as long as you’re still making
Memories a little faster
Than you’re losing them, it’s okay.

What’s the big deal, anyway?
You pick at your memories
Like scabs, or you collect them

Like tchotchkes filling your shelves,
Or you raid them like junk drawers
Rummaging for what you need.

A few of you are artists
Of scrap—you know who you are.
Somewhere down a rural road

Or on a scruffy corner
Where highway intersects town,
You’ve got one of those yards full

Of your leftover sculptures
Raised in the predictable
Suggestions of dinosaurs

Composed of mufflers and gears,
Or humanoid aliens,
Not quite robots or men,

Waving at the passers by,
Or, if you’re a real artist,
Maybe abstract collages

That ring in the wind, glitter
In the light, all those thought dreams
Of rearranging what was.