I feel sorry for them, their synthetic faces and skin, the meat they idolize, lovers of self, mimics of one another.
Their casket-sized hotel rooms and midnight panty thieves, a bee stinging a rhino beetle, a dropped apple flavored Jolly Rancher covered in a mosaic of trapped piss ants, a lemon shark in Lanier, a woman with a death wish, pristine capsules and pill-box sailboats, the Alpine city of Helen, Georgia, only 15 miles away and it's another country, a tourist trap where you can buy polished rocks posing as emeralds and rubies that some African found in a Mozambique river bank. Sparklers and pink roller skates, small shorts and tank tops, air hockey at the put-put coarse, pretty and mean girls from round here let everyone know real quick that it's better to be a diamond with a flaw than to be a pebble without any.
Shoulder to shoulder, they all line up to be executed, psychological graves are crudely dug up each day by the inmates, the shadow of a prison fence, the therapy and child-like bewilderment, the sober daylight and nightmares, dead family members slimy with grave-rot, speckled green and red fungus and a swollen black tongue fills the mouth. People sport the dislocated gait of a retard, the lepers and owls all hoot at each other, the loved and the unloved, they've never been caressed by a Persian lilac or seen the beauty in a wrinkled old nun washing the gnarled, tree-bark like feet of a beggar, the heavy coins in the fountain, the sad stone church out in the valley of Dogwoods where grows wildly the last fern, they say that even artichokes have hearts and that everybody dies.