Once this was a shallow salty sea,
alive with crustaceans in elaborate armor.
Aquamarine mountains of salt buried deeply
now tower towards the sky amidst the alien machinery.
The refining goes on all-night-and-all-day sending fire into the sky,
so that we might go to work in the morning,
or drive through the night to deliver a load of cat litter and socks.
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And we will be bored during this commute,
sitting alone in our cars,
inching past the traffic islands during rush hour
Littering the upholstery of our cars with chewed off fingernails.
I’d like to get a job mowing the traffic islands.
So I can get a better look at the very center of the city,
where everything moves so quickly around me that time appears slow,
and the loudness seems quiet.
Once intersections in ancient footpaths.
Once neighborhoods filled with black and brown children,
now these utilitarian earthworks stand with no name and no monument.
Dirt, gravel and stone is cut away in one place and deposited in another,
creating the graceful sweeping topographies of forgetting.
And the fossilized cretaceous remains are formed into
cathedral-like arches of the overpasses.
Once part of Paradise Valley,
now this place looks like a dollar sign.
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