“Vienna Woods”  skips on NPR,

to which I danced with my stick pony

and begged for graham crackers-

a long time ago.

Past ply-wooded Victorian mansions

-abandoned car graveyard.

Past “The “Villages At Lincoln”

a cheap facade

of human frustration

and drug addiction.

Crow’s wing plastered to warm pavement

dangles brazenly behind a Toyota Forerunner.

“Family Choice Budget Funeral Home”,

framed in the underarm

shoulder of barbed, dead cats, and poison ivy.

Past slab brick wiregrassed row houses

“Railroad Days,”

they sprawl like gassed gerbils,

rusted swing sets and McDonald’s bags.

Shirtless youth

cell phone.

(Flemming High School is in session)

Soaring through the overpass

still stained from

the suicide jumper.

Tires pick up his cell matter- past paper-cut mountains, blue and solid,

where black bears scratch for summer’s leftovers

and pant in anticipation of frost.

Wildflowers cold and silent, hidden on rocky slopes-

in those papered mountains-

that may not exist.

brown acreage of the bankrupt golf club,

Countryside’s proud, white barn,

its roof can-opened by storms-

perhaps its loft still with shreds of alfalfa

and memories of newborn calves.

Amber  Alert-

then exit off

past the sunglassed radar gun

and swollen ground hog.

I drive too slow to be stopped.