sympathy for the devil we knew in poetry

I went to a K-Mart going-out-of-business sale
to mourn a kind of America that has passed way
maybe no less evil in its consumerism but certainly less invasive
when at least the rich people worried about making money off your kids in twenty years
not just this financial quarter
when at least the rich people who lived in a mansion at the edge of town
instead of in a technobunker 2,000 miles away in Silicon Valley or Bentonville
Mr. Potter in ITS A WONDERFUL LIFE would be small potatoes comparing to them
lost and aghast at the Trumpian vulture capitalists we suffer under now
An older evil that at least had some sense of time and place
that could still co-exist with small businesses
instead of killing them and whole cities along the way to jump another stock tick up
I got my first He-Man figures there
my GI Joes
my bicycles
my clothes
my sense of what my world was

so godspeed K-Mart
godspeed to your long-gone lunch-counter stale popcorn and sandwiches
godspeed blue light specials goading us to believe that miracles may come
godspeed garden centre with ten thousand musty scents
godspeed to a world that I grew up in
that felt as though had no beginning and no end
just simply was
but was not and
now is gone

godspeed, the monsters were smaller back then
back then at least the monsters knew when they were full
the monsters back then knew that you could only eat so many villagers
if you wanted them to have sex and make more villagers
so that you could eat again in eighteen years
monsters with a modicum of perspective
buried now beneath stained linoleum floors
in retrospect, there were spaces to escape those smaller monsters then
and there were good times to be had
in those spaces in-between

I went to a K-Mart going out of business sale
to mourn a way of life I grew up along side
a way of life I thought was always going to be
then I drove off toward home
past the Warmart selling smiles and flags and guns all made in China
to prick my hands and check my blood sugar because I am changing too
I’m diabetic now, the doctor says, I have consumed too much and
now I am at risk of destroying myself
because I could not help myself
I just kept eating and
I am America, I suppose
I am visiting myself