Unelectric
Very conveniently the houses are wired
as cluttered electrocution chambers
if the world should so capriciously
decide.
Violence
fully realized
will be the intermittently pulsing telecast
of a major golf tournament
on Easter Sunday—
shocking on and off
generators cranking into gear.
The old neighbor across
comes halfway to confirm that ours is out too—
turns and ignites a cigarette
by his trashcan
back-facing.
Early evening sun and smoke
consume his white
hair like a vanilla-iced
birthday cake
on nana's picnic table
left to burn forever.
And yes it is beauteous
but untenably so
and he's gone.
The world has plugged us in and
its electricity is ferociously grounded—
up through the toilet throne's porcelain
and ceramic foot webs of decorative swans
migrating with our family's dying generations
from split-level mansion to condominium
up through the goal posts and
power line crucifixes and geranium bulbs.
We all know that this is what a flower's momentum is made of—
why leaves sputter madly
when chlorophyll circuitry scorches with current
fatally surly with gorgeous display.
The world has plugged us in to a network
of uneasy ecstasy—
I have always heard a young girl's scream
blindly
from two yards over and one back
perhaps beneath trampoline or plastic play fort
akin to mine of wood
where I once found bunnies in a hole
motionless and piled as if
shocked to death.
The world unplugged has caused
the refrigerator water
chilled by
the sun's reverse
to leave us too.
I think I'll bike around Sylvan Manor
and count the minnows spontaneously generated
in the spring thaw ditches
with the sliced tennis balls
and whipped cream tubs—
my rubber wheels accumulating the stinging charge and whipping
it all around in sparkling circles
foreshadowing great summery patriotism.
At this hour the light dilutes as if
dabbed with a rag
and whatever the consistency of that energy is
it is rung into the wind
so that wild air channels itself between houses
hungrily
as stray ungrounded voltage
in growing darkness.
Dusk is a beauty whose classification as a cliche
must be made aesthetically illegal
in respect to the glad fright indisputable to its nature
and the endlessness of its recurrence.
Dusk is
a locked elementary school at 12-years-old
with a public school friend from soccer
and his foreign subdivision sector
and the hungry dark current
and his two female friends
and the first sick feeling of poisoned electricity of
nervous potential and
windy twilight and
some other boy with a backpack pyro kit of
househeld items aggregated to divert attention
and successfully so
one of the girl's select playful touch and
the promise of everything strange and
opportunity felt wet and watery and mine
and every element possible
met upon the
playground—
danger and pleasure crossed like wires and
I have never known that brand of eagerness again—
to meet them the next night
to experience awful older things
in emphasis of my youth
but my friend got sick
and I had to go home
and I have now done it all
a million ways
and the power
won't come back
on again.