Sunday, February 27, 2011

Building Millions Of Identical Dream Homes

Doors slamming and horns blowing, echoed in hoarsely shouted, cursing repetition
Harsh laughing over un-muffled engines roaring, punctuated by metal beating
Brakes screeching and alarms beeping, dirty men gunning belchingly-inefficient motors
Nailers pounding after saws shriek as the lumber is falling with painful groaning

Dirt drying and worms dying under the trash dumped into slimy excavations
Trees not cut but simply bulldozed and bushes driven over, time and again
Men toughened by the sun and from the unsightly destruction they call construction
Weeds and litter springing up in a muddy tribute to the wonders of their good work

Crazily, the wastes of their noble creation are so great as to require giant dumpsters
Horrible music spiced with cheap fast food is stuffed into the dirty faces of unkempt heads
Compressors beat themselves to death as their old-time gasoline motors clatter
Men driven by simple thoughts of cold beer, lounge chairs and big-screen sports TV

Expensive but crooked knot-hole ridden lumber laying about awaiting resurrection
Artificially-honorable livings earned, to feed simple but crude workingman illusions
Timelines missed, mistakes ignored, costs illegally cut but prices raised in any case
On this site a memoriam to waste and filth and greed: This is all patriotic and blessed by god

Their trash and urine built into the foundations of some good mommie’s dream home
The same oft-made mistakes covered up, but still unsafe, on this latest job as well
Materials pilfered by the crew are quietly replaced with castoff scraps of lesser quality
Cabinets scratched or plumbing broken by the ham-handed are reported as freight losses

Men surly and late-arriving to not-even-showing, hung over, missing sleep and way in debt
They belch acidly like dyspeptic frogs croaking for that good old cheap caffeine
Their smoking butts tossed thoughtlessly into their deeply senseless drying mud truck tracks
Tobacco-blackened lungs hacking green morning wads onto the shattered ground

Swelled with horny pride by the smelly but inert gas of twangy TV spin doctors
Getting into fights and quitting, breaking shit on purpose and muttering obscenities
Conquering the work site wasteland in their pathetically-juvenile, loud pickup trucks
Farting in each other’s faces and laughing as more of their filthy, yellow teeth fall out

Crushing coke cans into the dead earth with manly boots made by tiny Chinese women
Reflexively swelling with warlike pride pumped from cagey 30 second neo-con sound bites
From this site they laugh at the wrecks they erected across the street just 10 years ago
Shouts straining to overcome their groaning machinery as it dispatches their new prey

Creating jobs to fund mindless recreation, overeating, beer and cheap plastic imports
Earning their keep, maintaining their pride and playing their role in our great progress
And the earth lays gouged, gashed and ignored somewhere under their new rubble
Our dull but brute strength screamingly pounds out another good family’s happily ever after

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