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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