keith haring explanations lit up
by sodium fluorescence tangled in a web
on the side of the road,
with passer-bys and lookie-loos
barely paying an iota of attention
to the culture laid before them,
the streets bleeding from beneath
pop up ads keep blinking on-
off-on-off—
i can’t seem to gracefully browse
the abyss without
some piece of code
harassing me
with a sense of inadequacy,
and the clues of what
i need to know don’t seem
to come through clearly in the transmission
a mystery is solved every 4 minutes,
only to be confronted by another conundrum
every 3 seconds,
until the unknown overtakes the known,
and all i’m left with is is a dowsing rod covered
in peanut butter
after spending an entire afternoon
looking for the most perfect pb&j sandwich
out in the wild,
though it seems like they’ve all gone extinct
Fred Aiken Writing 