The Track
This track is bloated with the grotesque and mad
in their low-wage dresses and top-dollar perfumes,
whoring their hearts for Vegas magic
as angels trumpet perverse songs of praise
for the thoroughbreds racing through the crimson mist.
But under these halogen skies
my faith is restored by the men of the raceway
and their eternal recklessness,
carrying oxygen tanks like embattled soldiers
stepping through a nuclear blast,
kissed by the sun’s flame
and sculpted by a forgotten God
into the last lineage of the holy and sane.
Gut
Under these gaslight lamps marauders plot and pivot and hustle,
starving for the invention of disorder,
speaking with corroded tongues. Indigo bubble vests
thick as whale blubber on the stoops they perch
amidst this decaying paradise of lost souls and poverty
and lucid dreams of journeys through place and time
where men like this cease to exist and are replaced
with inanimate objects born of crest and creed. For the quest
goes without saying and such is evident by the strollers
occupying the crumbled lots and resurrecting their walls
with disdain and merry and lies through the ears of those
not born with reserves nor a gambler’s eye
but rather see this conquering of lands as a black hole
that only grows deeper for the void of life it creates.
by Rit Bottorf
Rit Bottorf lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and daughter.
