Even so, Gun is tired of it all.
All his love and patience,
worn to dust, his sweet memories
of childhood, frayed, illegible postcards.
His Mom, his Dad, angels
he can never locate, like all angels.
He climbs into the world’s largest
bulldozer, turns the key. Smoke
vomits from the thousand-foot stack,
a sooty storm cloud massing.
He finds a pair of aviators on the dash,
puts them on, he’s feeling real fancy.
He drops the bucket, puts the machine
into gear. He’s a destroyer
on vast levels now.
Fuck this place, he shouts, Fuck you all!
Houses, cars, entire highways,
gleaming skyscrapers all fall to the force
of Gun’s iron bucket.
The people see what he’s doing and they
like it. Of course they do.
They walk in the wake of the dozer,
broken glass slicing up their cheap sneakers.
They cheer whenever a thing falls,
the thing man-made, the thing
they once made and took photos of.
And for what, and for why did they?
Who knows. Now, they are giddy with
obliteration. They gather splintered wood
and light bonfires, orange blazes
on the ragged field. They truly love
the damage, but now have no shelter.
Gun keeps rolling across the land,
tearing and rending.
Night falls. The people lie down
in the tracks of the dozer,
they sleep under suddenly new stars.
———
Michael Henry is co-founder and Executive Director of Lighthouse Writers Workshop, an independent literary center located in downtown Denver. His poetry and nonfiction have appeared in places such as 5280 Magazine, Georgetown Review, Threepenny Review, Pleiades, and Copper Nickel.
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