August, Christmas & Black Holes
Driving in August Dog days listening to Christmas music. Pumpkins on the side of the road and I just bought a Halloween sign at Big Lots.
Can’t tell one season from the next anymore. Religious believers say it’s a sign that Jesus is coming.
I say it’s a sign that the only place the 18th century can be found any longer is riding on a rocket ship or in a stethoscope, and it ain’t coming back.
Old mountain folk say to count the heavy fogs in August to know how many winter snows will come, and how much wood to cut.
Those signs are a dying breed, sucked in by the Beatles, Derrida, Foucault, that whole death of reason carnival that gathered gravity like a black hole at the center of a galaxy till an entire culture has been vacuumed in.
What do we have now? A freak show with the media as ring man, a plotless story so bad that even it can’t be deconstructed, a place where the inmates give therapy to the masses.
So look for the signs, any sign, that a hair crack is flying through air.
Ralph Monday is Associate Professor of English at Roane State Community College in Harriman, TN., and has published hundreds of poems in over 50 journals. A chapbook, All American Girl and Other Poems, was published in July 2014. A book, Empty Houses and American Renditions, was published May 2015 by Aldrich Press. A Kindle chapbook, Narcissus the Sorcerer, was published June 2015 by Odin Hill Press.