Pond

Meteor snaps to flame. A bird

turns its head unaware—sense

of dread as true as hunger.
Its bones then ride the wrong side
of a shooting star straight

into the long target of our ground.
No escape from the errant velocity
of everything, the way Sherman
drank all that hero juice and drove
his Dad's Camaro straight to redline.

The crash took forever. Street lights folded
into old and droopy orchids (all color gone),

the crumpling metal sounded planned,

with the station wagon big as a drive-in screen

for his last movie. Another doomed mother

shouts her kids' names so they’d hear
how sorry we can suddenly be.

A grandson announces all he's going to do,

and Grandpa says, “All there is for any man

is to accept himself before he’s gone for good.”

Members of the day’s Kiwadi Wash patrol

whisper code into headsets to take their positions

while the mujahedin gesture to each other silently

for everyone to find the best rock they could,

and the firing started, with America’s best

M4 Carbine Assault Rifles, designed by Colt,

5.6 millimeter caliber bullets, gas-operated,

firing off 700 to 850 rounds per minute,

while 7,000 miles to Washington D.C.

a technician on satelite duty jokes,

“Man, that’s miles and miles of nothing.”

Back in L.A., Officer Hickman worries

about his Hazmat suit, and the holes

it’s getting from all the use, budget cutbacks

in the way of safety, while the highways amaze

with the volume of better and better poison

getting trucked to U.S. farms and factories.

Florida panther wears the night

like Dracula's finest emperor cloak.

Mojave rattlesnake glories on a pocket mouse

and the feeling he won't have to eat for a week.
California condor plummets in ragged shadows

after drinking from a puddle of anti-freeze
left over from a radiator flush outside Fillmore.

Johnny Bongos comes in from a cigarette,

announces if the jungle wrote a book,

most people’d be dead before they finished it.

And as much as Rita loves the little drunk,

her debt to trouble's long paid off, and

in  world not built for saving poets,

what’s a dreamy sales admin to do,

with Johnny seeking the same destruction
killed his father, as if knighthood waited.
A crane follows the interiors of its DNA south
over New Mexico, but that old pond is gone,
wings turn to solid wood, then air fails.