God in Question

We have never been what we have wanted to gain,

scooping our family debris, in the way

an apartment garden proudly decomposes.

Garbage fetters the flow, does not care to impose

spent smoke bombs, ruddy phlox, baby seashells,

melted crayons.  Love is not tossed-out pails

but we inflect the lowly harrumph of mucking up,

billows of trash bags calm us, plastic cups.

Couldn’t someone sound alarm, push a fuzz-pad

for elevators to take us to polished beds

in an actual house?  Buried patterns, the lofty

is not our station, our vaudeville is only coughed.

Burned to lonesome clinkers, wearing child boots,

lacking blooms, we are pigments, shades of soot.

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Benjamin Pryor is from Maggie Valley, NC.  His work has appeared in The Oxford American, The Southern Review, Cimarron Review, Oxford Magazine, The Wallace Stevens Journal, The North Carolina Literary Review, Main Street Rag, MiPOesias Magazine, and Pataphysica. He currently lives in Chapel Hill.