Paving North Georgia

Driving up 575 north to Ellijay
Christmas morning
and they emerged in the rearview,
a neon green armada.
They kept tight ranks,
with three in the left lane
and three in the right,
hauling who knows how many tons
of liquid civilization.

After I turned off the highway
just past the first Burger King after the Sam's Club,
across from the Waffle House but before the Hardee's,
I watched them roll on,
like giant robotic mollusks from some midnight sci-fi flick,
off to pour more driveways and parking lots.

What good's a mountain view
if you haven't got anyplace to shop?

The Man Who Had Nothing To Say

A grizzled old man once said,
"There is nothing here,"
and everything listened.
And once he had its attention,
he explained nothing,
as if it were something,
in fact, as if it were everything
and more.

The man said
that all that is
is man
and man creates all
that is,
including that which created man
which man has made
nothing,
just like itself.

Man likes to make things,
said the man,
even though these things
are nothing at all,
but simply things
that the nothing
(man)
wants to make.

So the man made things,
telling other men
to tell other men
to do everything,
since all was nothing,
said the man,
and men needed something to do.

When questioned,
the man said
the questions
(like everything)
were nothing,
and he was everything,
since he was right.

And after the man said everything
something came
out of the nothing,
something that was always there,
but hid in the nothing
watching everything,
including
the man, who had said
the something
was no longer anything.

And the something
made the man
into nothing.

And everything
except the man
was still there.

And the man had nothing to say.

The Guilty White Hush

You hear it in a lot of places
but it's usually in an office.
Some white person is talking about something
just going along talking and talking
and then it comes up in some way or another
and their voice drops to a whisper
just when they say

black

or sometimes even to say

African-American

kind of like we did when we were kids
if we wanted to get away with swearing
while the teacher was in the room.

Downtown Birmingham at Midnight

Sodium lights cast pale peach
over the rain-glazed granite, brick and sandstone
as a few overlooked flourescents still hum behind greasy factory windows.

The coarse concrete of the bridges
is chipped away here and there
exposing the rust
that bleeds from the iron rebar.

By this hour nearly everything’s closed –
the courthouse, law offices, banks,
the jewelry stores with heavy cases and medicinal smelling proprietors,
the body shops, the formal wear outlet and the cosmetology school.

The shop signs with blocky business names and brushstroke slogans
are still such sources of pride
for the shopkeepers' ghosts, leaning in the doorways of places that used to be.
But no one sees them.
The day shift beat a hasty retreat at 5:00,
the lawyers to their Pottery Barned homes in Mountain Brook and Vestavia,
the clerks to their cheap apartments in Southside and Tarrant.

The only ones left
are a few homeless, a few roving cops,
and, swaggering out of the karaoke bar,
a group of restless young men,
each one with his hand on his crotch and a chip on his shoulder,
eyes and jaws set hard.

Trains
and bass from the trunks of lowered Mustangs
rumble in the distance
as red warning lights
blink from the smokestacks of the old steel mills,
the too late protest of a drunken party host
begging the guests to stay.