City Limits

Great names painted on the mural

Of the Temple of Knowledge

In the café of the Barnes and Noble.
NIETZSCHE      KAFKA       DICKENS

Are they sitting among us right now?

Here in the shopping mall?

Eating Cinnabons in the wash of smooth jazz,

“music made by CIA agents” my dad used to call it?

A man down the bench has a stack

Of yellow books: “Currency Exhange For Dummies” 

“Crowdsource Funding For Dummies” 

“Hedgefunds For Dummies.” An amateur psychotherapist,

Using “Psychotherapy for Dummies,” performs

psychotherapy on himself. He tells me I’m suffering

from an Oedipal Dilemma caused by withdrawal

of maternal affection at a young age. I’m creating a great drama

Of failure, culling a subject out of my misery,

It’s the way a coward gives his life meaning

when he refuses his purpose.

That will be $400 for the hour he says

And his straw rattles as he sucks the last

Of my iced frappaccino.

I leave the café        (strange gulag)     my Toyota snarling

Smoke from a hood dented

Into a curled lip.

These two lanes will take us anywhere

Croons Bruce Springsteen

From the simultaneous dashboards

Of a city stuck in traffic.

I take refuge in the White Castle,

my alma mater turned to trash.

Eating sliders and working on a half-assed novel

I am exactly where I was

When I started

And it’s taken me ten years

To get here.