blue skies poetry

 

A slagheap of dollars

with portions hidden behind facades

designed by famous international architects

down on their luck

–an immense tailings mound of money

toward which fleets of tanker trucks

sloshed full of additional cash

stream to disgorge
Two inches of fresh snow overnight

at mid-May 
A buffalo standing, head lowered, defeated

as though formed of suburban ornamental brush

in a yard beside the traffic stalled at the corner of

32nd Avenue and Shaganappi

just east of Market Mall  
			    Cigarette smoke

churning onto the street from the bar doorways

where according to the police crime tally

young white men stab each other every second midnight

alternating with Vietnamese gangs whose preference for disputes is

pistols and long guns  
			A metropolis in which

nobody is born

permitting the demolition of half the hospitals

and the resultant tax saving applied

to subsidize private plastic surgery clinics  
					         A blizzard

pushing southward in June, that drags down

limbs of the ornamental cherry

and suffocates the narcissus  
			          A Dodge pickup

hauling two dead cows, heads lolling out the tailgate

in an attempt to hold at a distance

the customary flock of spoiler-equipped sports cars

quivering inches behind whatever moves along asphalt

in their anxiety to be anyplace else  
				         Frost on the lawns

one July morning  
		     Sour gas corporation CEOs

awarded annual remuneration

four hundred times the average wage of company employees

who still insist they are generously paid

A person who lives off investments

complaining about the sloth of the poor  
					     Icy wind from the mountains

August 13th, snowflakes suspended in mid-air

from an overcast, melting when they eventually descend
Swaths of tract houses eating the Prairie

at each cardinal point: acres of treeless bloated dwellings

that seep outward from the shopping centers  
						 Sleet

in early September, the streets whitening
as the Bow River curls quietly through

wafting its suicides and abandoned mattresses

toward Hudson’s Bay, lower trunks of the cottonwood

and aspen that line its route

wrapped in wire to discourage the presence of beaver

and thus demonstrate efficient management of the biosphere
To the north, the featureless hump of Nose Hill Park

rears over its expanding ring of freeways

–bleak tombstone for what failed to thrive