George T. Mormann

Tag: life

August 16, 2018

One of Several Million People Driving to O’Hare

Sometimes I cannot handle the abruptness of contrast. There needs to be a larger gray area between my rooster cock-a-doodle-dooing at 5:30am and being honked at by a WASP in a Mercedes 4matic on I-294 at 6:35

…although I know this was good timing considering the construction delays.

I need at least a day’s notice before I have to immerse myself in everyone else’s fray. You can’t drag me out of the boondocks so easily anymore.

My chronic lower back pain disappeared in the therapeutic air of dried husks and manure; it stung me as soon as I craned my neck to read the tall signs and billboards.

Oh hell, Butch, even Joliet is too big anymore.

Too many lights on at night.

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December 28, 2017

Youth, it is

a sandcastle
admired for a day,
abandoned to the
inevitable tide.
Photographs, like
grains of sand,
rouse the shallows
where memory wades.

a dollop chased out
of a jar of promises,
an arthritic swivel
of a fingertip
twisting counter-
clockwise against
the hands of time.

reclaimed in somber
remembrances
over a box of ash
filled before the age
of seventy.

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September 23, 2017

Always Another Apocalypse

I completely forgot, until I got news of Kylie Jenner’s pregnancy,
that today is supposed to be the apocalypse.
Again.
I recall following the last apocalypse (not the Mayan one: that was a misinterpretation of their calendar and our own), and it was slated for 6pm Illinois Time, which may or may not be sunset in Jerusalem.
All the country’s pious radio stations abruptly quieted, as if to mimic
the sudden blackening of the Earth, like people wouldn’t feel tremors beneath their feet, or hear the screams of a million sinners, before they themselves perished.
No, the last apocalypse was treated like a flip of a switch in God’s cellar as he turned off the lights after retrieving his spare can opener.

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August 21, 2017

Comparable Meagerness

She grew up poor.
Her parents laid
off the nanny
when she learned
to feed herself.

For me, nothing
felt as rich as
a hot shower
following
a year’s wait.

This, she never
could understand
because water
always flowed
warm where she’s from.

Still, we endured
a similar
hunger, making
for sordid
competition.

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October 11, 2011

Brown Road

I’m in the mood to drive,
but a destination I
can do without.
On a road with no
speed limit I will
press the throttle
to the floor and close
my eyes, or ease off
it, and fall asleep
behind the wheel, in
the backdrop of
a rural expanse.
Coast across the barren
cornfields and not care
they will soon sprout and
grow shopping plazas.
The future can’t touch me;
I’m not headed that way.
The past I already fixed
by breaking the rearview
mirror; I need no luck
on a road of emptiness.
On this drive I
procure only exhaust
and take from it
only the scenery.

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