In the West

In the West you can find, 
 taking a road trip, say,
 in a lot, 
 a cyst hugging your dead highway, 
 advertised on a billboard, 
 sixteen miles to a 
 two-bit tourist trap, 
 planted squat in dusty soil,
one thin shadow 
 cast a dark arm sweep away 
 from the sun with the 
 turning. 
 

The reaching obelisk that throws 
 this long trench bears an inscription, 
 the epigraph chipped away by 
 the fury of a wind some juniper branch 
 no longer guards against, 
 which reads, pompous and ominous, 
 “Here lies your ensuing spawn.” 
 

You wouldn’t know it glancing  
 through the half set window 
 out to the empty graveland 
 radiating from that nuclear monument, 
 the idle acres
 layered uneasily atop a sedimentary 
 necropolis whose architect 
 was divine 
 conquest and the cherub Progress, 
that it is not, in fact, a cemetery 
 where mourners gather to deposit 
 lonely orchids and lilies and desert daisies,
but is instead a laboratory, 
 sterile and scrubbed clean 
 and deliberately ordered as any. 
 

And this lab is not a house for indulging 
 funded curiosity, 
 but one experiment only, 
 replicated over and over, 
 intended to discover one thing only: 
 what may rent space in the accidental void 
 carved out by endless twitching impulses, 
 the constant series of 
 hunger boredom lust 
fear fear fear