Hutchinson

Carried by the scentless streets of
Hutchinson Kansas are the darkest moments
of my life--memories of driving red-eyed
in the mist, water streaming down the
faces of lonely street-lights.

The humid chill of Hasting's parking lot
where Chapman and I slugged down bummed
cans of beer; and inside where I began my
quest for Mid-America Satori and the
rosy little Mexican cashier who i so
pitifully fell in love with.

On the gloaming road that connects Hutch
to Buhler, secret coyotes mourn their tragedies of love; I've crossed
this stretch of wretched asphault in fifty thousand past-lives:
dumb, shattered, and swerving.

And the local mall where imbeciles go
to gain stupid bedazzlement from neon
lights, the purchase of ephemeral happiness,
and cheap glances at young girls' asses,
the mall itself a human hamster wheel.

Teenagers having wet dreams over muscle
cars (how life can fool itself) and speaking
the ignorant scat of arrogance (knowwhatI'msayin?knowwhatI'msayin?knowwhatI'msayin?)

There was Chad and I in a rickety
camero, sitting on the back and
laughing dumbly as the world around us
died
like slow-burning paper.

There was the old man who
worked inside, who
couldn't count change, who
came to this concrete retirement home to
work at Food 4 Less and die.

There was Jones, Schrag, and I
breezing throught the smoky neighborhoods
in our own Samadhi of exuberant words
and colors--we successfully
destroyed
the world around us--and when the rapture finally
comes I pray I'll be too euphoric to notice;

Like the skankiness inhabiting Hutchinson--
the trashcan of Kansas that reeks of
oblivious masturbation, a fate from which
my beloved poets and heroes finally escaped.

Ginsberg wrote this about Hutchinson:
"Not even the human
imagination satisfies
the endless emptiness of the soul,"
in a book I bought there.