I wander these streets at night alone
Convinced that the construction zone pit
Is a message meant for me
The screened-off work area
A black fabric cosmos pockmarked
With the tears of solar flares
Hidden gravitational pulls that hide
The Caterpillar bulldozers
Earth movers
Even when uninhabited
The trailers of the crew
Shine like metallic will-o-the-wisps
Luring me
And the occasional stray dog into sunken ruin
Have you seen it,
Past the bend where Kaimalie Street
Dissolves and in its place
A wonderful pit
A myriad of roads to nowhere?
For whom the display of empty show homes
With pick-ups parked outside?
At the base of the hills by Kapolei
Flashing lights beam my way
Like campfires of an invading army
Hostile to my self-reliance
And quiet rhythm of heel to toe
Heel to toe
Have you seen them,
The metal skeletal outlines of reindeer
Wrapped with wires of miniscule lights
Perched upon people’s lawns
The annual visit from the North Pole to graze beneath palm fronds?
Deliberate motion
The eeriness is calculated
To coincide with my approach
So that they lift up their eyeless heads
To threaten me with wonder
Curious that there are no other night
Walkers or joggers
Distorting the meaning so that I
Am now Grendel
Prowling about the outskirts of Heorot
Looking for retainers to tear
Limb from limb
I motion the signs of defense runes in the air
So that the seeing eyelessness
Of commercialized, prefabricated
Substitutes for endangered quadruped mammals
Places no fetters upon me
Projects not into me concentrated beams of dis-ease
I know the sidewalk completely crumbles behind me with each step that I take,
Exposing an omnipresent vacuity
Blacker than tar
The void casts me into a fake neighborhood
Of plywood
No good
The shoddiness of the construction
Reveals to me the fallible presence of the
Demiurge
Outsider to Gnosis
Thundering and pointing to all who would
Listen
His pathetic litany of trademark names
And infomercial games
And pseudo-assurances
Twenty-four hour monitoring home security systems
Buy it and believe
Believe and ye shall be saved
In pursuit of one of the myriad roads
To know
Where
Surely I got lost
Nearly slammed my body into the DEAD END sign
If only all things could be so honest
In this kaleidoscope of lies
This procession of uniform aluminum siding
But I found the broad avenue of exit
No narrow and rocky Via Dolorosa for me, thanks
I didn’t even acknowledge the snowman made of lights as he chivalrously tipped his
Top hat towards me
With so much as a nod
I had blinders on
I will bolt
I will bolt the door now
amor et mortem 