If Shoelaces Sang Little Rich Town Blues

Not in tea leaves, in shoelaces tie existence--their harsh and meshing material bound, tethered, undone with a gentle pull. The bunny ears and clumsy fingers bouncing along the faux-marble hallways: the future politicians and CEO's and poets wiping caked mucus on the white-washed brick foundations-- babbling babbling babbling babbling. A blood-stone bed surge of tidal maturation, soon to be lost in the variant eddies of life; the finger-painted puzzle-box open and unsolvable. Their parents, for they are honorable, as picket-fences are honorable, as tracksuits are honorable, as Zoloft is honorable, sit ajar on school streets of vibrant myriad cars quietly dilapidating behind Armor-All dashes. Old ladies waving dutifully at lifeless lawn ornaments like lifeless lawn ornaments soon themselves in front of homes because the youth only want something old when it's time to marry, Googling what the heart feels for the occasion. Smokestack color windows of depreciating souls searching drunken down the glossy oak bar through bent light of whiskey glasses and broken values they blame on Nietzsche and the price of condoms, finding a sad reflection seated at this world's dampened end to spread like ashen snow again and again and again on sweat-stained futons, after the lurch toward the water, sloppy with kisses and lace. Church bells sound off one and two O! clock tower marching Heaven to Hell but got lost in Devil's Lake. They do not hear the beaten shopping cart radio wobbling like a tripodal Dog, telling us Jesus stayed inside because White is translucent in the rain. But, the wander-footed waywards, leaden eyed, tranced in droning hums of small town streetlights-- or red red copper hangers or lucid jaundice confessions or gangrenous light-slivered closets-- break half-empty beer bottles on familial-faced slogans plastered to an under-bellied bridge and sway like ebbing wind on the unsure-step shore banks, drooping wasp legs over the ever-rising precipice to vein-rush Hellgrammite powder with their one remaining shoelace and leave their shoes behind.