(The Fourth War)

Oh its all great fun
in the corn maze
until someone gets lost--

earth art,
crop circles without
the laughs, digging

around in Drumheller
for Beefheart's
"dinosaur cold"--

inside the Holy Mountain
midsummer light
etches your profile

onto plywood as you sleep.
The assumption is that
the big important shapes, say

where shotgun
overlaps with two-stroke
to define rural metrosexuality--

Richard Boone in
Have Gun Will Travel
on a pimped out

Triumph on the Parkway,
raw from the abrasions
of the English Leather soap label,

an angled mustache
that still reads "ex-officer"
from Victoria north to Campbell River,

whose neoprene longjohns
enable him to tough it out
until November,

or where rising fuel costs
temporarily trump
the fear of cresote & coalsmoke

to re-enable the choking fogs
that had disappeared
with the industrial base--

that all of this is safely tracked
from space, indeed
to be lost is ultimately

economic, those people
under the rubble assumed
their cell phones

would save them, an island
held in place
with mirrors, they

can hear you, they
can see you, they
just can't help you.