How steel is the the stolen
look at another adjective
delivered to zero zero zero
Bakersfield Street, where
the homes are locked and
too sure of themselves
for their material, loyal
t shirts. Yes, they wear
their beiges well, these
abodes not at all adobe.
It's a shaken wooden
sidelong shield that
dwells in fictional
accounting, first-in
worst-out, or that's
what you're to believe
if you let your leaves
down in this neighborhood.
The shadows lengthen on
cloudy days here, for how
bright the emissions are
from the pole-held diodes.
Will we be pole-held as
well, the characters ask.
And it is not a question.
Every statement is a state
of meant-to-be that cannot
ask will it be, for Shakespeare
could not have predicted the
typewriters of this town. They
put ink on pages before steel
touch tips. The writers in this
place are super real. They reel
in the millimeters to prove that
film has got nothing on the scripts
that made them. And they are vague
in all the right ways, with all the
dissonant words that do not mean
anything, such as "that" and "they"
and "such". Blue and purple and
red and indigo fight for spectral
pictures whose true colors will
be told in whichever paperbacks
survive the fires that ravage
this disconnected place.
Roman Ryan 