Twenty-First

The candy century ends.
Scarcity, sixty years unseen, reappears.
Seventeen year locusts on steroids.
A billion layers of buzz.
Petal bags worn around the neck.
A stink ignored, not cleaned up.
A choreographed dance of automated machines.
Americans awash in worker despair.
Embedded suicide rate.
Credit big Pharma companies.
Esteemed wealthy corruption culprit.
The invisible hand’s thumbs down.
Pureed savior squeeze bottle skin cream.
Mummy dust back in the free market pharmacies.
Street corner poet sermons.
Crown-of-thorns the drooling fool.
Clouds unlisted on the futures market.
A thirsty drought abnormality.
Water table depletion topsoil dust bowl.
Enough rope to stretch a billion necks.
A knuckleball issue flutters past the political swing.
How you licked your ice cream cone.
How a nude bather redressed in white cotton.
Why crowd sourcing fails to replace the tax base.
Why cruelty needs millennial revision.
You curse my hows and whys.
You reel at the twenty first century reality.
We kneel like old times side by side.
We murmur separate prayers.

copyright © 2019 Kenneth P. Gurney