By Michael Conley
we take a wrong turn, zip of freeway
giving way to loose rocks
and potholes and limbs and pine needles
trusting in the thickness of unfamiliar tyres
against a starless backless blackness
and now all the large unencountered creatures
By Michael Conley
I’m tired of pretending it isn’t magnificent
when a normal man with an ordinary haircut,
normal jacket, normal trousers, pissed since noon,
bundles himself over the barrier into an elite sports arena
and runs and runs until he’s taken down.
I’m tired of pretending to side with the commentators,
their theatrical outrage, their ability to produce
a discourse that claims the status of truth:
here is an idiot, they tut, he’ll be banned for life
and rightly so. Here is a lone stranger, they say,
come to threaten our very way of living, we invite you
to root for the resumption of the status quo.
Not even half of us here in the stadium are booing.
Imagine being, for once, the dog on the playground,
a starlet in the flashbulbs. Imagine not being a coward.