Hometown Hocus Pocus

I didn't believe I'd actually miss you,

with your one road in and out —

drunk drivers writing lengthy complaints

in boggled cursive with their skid marks,

faintly mumbling curses at the grid marks

toggled back and forth

between uplifting and prohibitive.

Your safe, conservative

horizontal plane is endlessly self-derivative,

staunchly perpendicular

to your rate of escape, by vehicular

or intellectual means,

which continues to plummet into the negative.

You spill sameness downward,

like soft serve into plain waffle cone lives,

but never forget to add the sprinkles

or the occasional chocolate dip

to spice up the vanilla.

Your residents choose,

with a scintilla

of glibness,

between Charybdis and Scylla —

to remain and surrender

a yearly pound of flesh,

or to venture beyond the barbed wire mesh

safety net that your crippling culture provides

and risk the yawning maw

of the open world,

where strange ideas drift.

I concede, there's beauty

underneath your trademark grift,

even miffed as I am by its

efficaciousness.

The capaciousness of your nature

and the tenaciousness of your people,

though they may lack some sagaciousness,

slightly offset the voraciousness of evil

which permeates the doctrines

of your unwritten law

still thoroughly enforced.

Poverty and addiction are endorsed

by gentry neighbors,

tragedy and pain juxtaposed against

affluence and apathy.

The apogee: a tainted rose commenced

to prick the finger

of the inebriated vagrant

who was enthralled by its beauty.

The poison, fierce and flagrant,

ravaged his body,

but he expired in ecstasy,

softened by the sunset tint

of his intoxication.

Some radiant few who

discovered his body

lifted him up and mourned his fate,

nameless though he was,

the sorrow did not dissipate.

They reviled their careless peers

and took up the fight

against that blight

of misery via philanthropic mutiny.

For all my myopic scrutiny,

these are better men than me.