Driving Through

Driving Through

It gets whiffed in the ticking of the night clock.

There’s a For Sale sigh on the site of the Swan

But the Swan swam into the black lake of progress

Decades before.

The Swan died in the ticking of the night clock.

Some architect out of conscious inanity

Built a tower of modern mediocrity on the grave

They pretended to honor the feathers plucked

By the hands of change and profitability

Now decades later

The tower dissolves in the ticking of the night clock.

God wound the night clock eon’s ago

And set it on our mantel

Man did not wind it

Man cannot stop the spring

He can only wait out the ticking of the night clock.

The old comfortable stores are gone.

Smoke stacks no longer write their names across the sky.

Fools flocked here in the rising graphs of real estate

And now they clutter the roads and paths

And worry about

Foreclosures in the ticking of the night clock.

And that is the way

At the end of the day

The piper we pay

As we count out the ticking of the night clock.