at the William Carlos Williams Observatory

A chain gang dressed
In black and white and pink
Clanks with garbage sacks
Along the roadside--
Flagged for minor drug crimes,
Abuse caught at the wrong time,
Some free words delivered to cops
Who learned a license had expired.

They toil below the cancer-yellow clouds
And early morning rainbows' stick-on sheets,
Through stiff and urgent stalks on rough-faced floors,
Of endless mesquite groves and greasewood fields,
Purple beads of cactus rounds, palm and white lime trees,
Seeds like hardened tears, inflamed red,
Dried weeds lush in concrete cracks.

In their horizontal stripes they look like Sisyphus
With trash bags as their boulders;
One can see the Arby's wrappers
Roll along already the curvaceous sand
To land with multiple stab wounds in alluring thorns
While the breezes of the open pit just bellow on.

The horrors of the image
Have to rise above the flowers;
Always the ideal
Screams beyond the calm:
The loveless, broken, violent
In a facade's stoic ambers,
Is there only this as choice:
A still and lifeless landscape
Or a portrait with the voyeur's garish colors
Beyond the well-placed shock
To teach us all to mind?

We who, like the Indians
In their Levittown wattles,
Recycle our bottles
As glass in the sun,
Let all our refuse out
Like a pet?

They say "There are some things you can only learn in prison:
Religion is for people who are afraid to go to hell
Spirituality is for those who've already been there."

I see how these cities in the sand can never stay,
The prophets always leave
To scream about its sun,
To condemn the encroachments on the barren,
How one can no longer see the stars
Except in people, as once you only saw
People in the stars.