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In the West

April 21, 2020 By Samuel Miller McDonald Leave a Comment

Photo by John Fowler on Unsplash
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

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Filed Under: Poetry

About Samuel Miller McDonald

Samuel Miller McDonald is a geography PhD candidate at University of Oxford studying the politics of energy transition. He is an editor at The Trouble and a writer. His work is here & tweets @sjmmcd.

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