Moths

There’s a scarecrow on a cross
and it’s shadow spreads across the land
like it is doing everything to get its feeble
arms to wrap around the earth and slow it down.
Tables at restaurants with hot sauce bottles
in the shade of the partially open blinds
are occupied by inter dimensional guests.
They know diners like this are monuments
to the surreal American experience,
and I am shocked looking up from my half
eaten sandwich that there are things out there
dreaming of what it’s like to be me.
She turns a dial on her watch and finally lets
me see what she is underneath all that
new technology and I don’t understand how
anything is real.
I’m not sure how I feel walking home from
that oasis of light in the closed down darkness
of the later night when everyone reaches
the climax of their nightmares. A stray mutt
with a rabbit in its jaw takes a loud piss
in the center of the roadway and then bolts
away back out into the trees.
I pass the front porch of a house party now
descended to the point where only two girls
drank alone at a card table from a dented keg.
They offer me a plastic cup and say they’re
trying to finish it before sunrise.
I take the offered parting gift and down it
as I realize that I’ve never seen this town
in all my life.