The Landmark Poem by Julia Luber

I have to get across this mental block, refine my own patois.
Rugged and suffocating in a swathe of desire. I degenerate-
stuff up with all kinds of strange garb my armoire. I am stranger
and weirder than I seem. Why do I look so normal? Except that.

Except that fat- so outside the rules of this stuffed up town.
Stuffed up because it's stuffy. And the place is suffocating
with cars and traffic. Heat is grime is scorch is discomfort.
Homeless people are starting to be landmarks. How awful.

You remember that you're home because of that homeless guy.
Creeping around. Looking like he is rolling into the street itself,
like he has tasted asphalt for breakfast. Is this really life? To know
that I am almost home after a trip because that homeless guy there.

Are we home? It feels familiar here. There is a grimy gritty odor occupying
the bevies of markets and restaurants. It is so unhappy and practically a form
of a chronic disconcertment. Something is supposed to be done to save this
place from anymore of this, or is it already too late?

Too late seems to be what the local vocabulary is centered by. And life
flows out like ripples around that axis. That dirty sweaty grimy access.
Aggression has saturated our nerves in silence- becoming the motion
of the car itself. Making us think we have special powers.

To move these machines through this landscape where life itself
feels like an industrialist aggression on the world that has become
a place for cars, not people, but cars, machines, infractions of what
the world was meant to be like; something we are all guilty of.