Two Ways

They're splitting Fourth Street so it goes two ways;

Third Street was undone the same way too.

The yellow marks are down; the lights ready to raise 

To blink from red to green on something new.

As if the city didn't have, already,

A pair of streets to take the traffic through:

Consistent, simple, wide, and ever-steady

Prepared to take you where you want them to.

From two streets, each contributing its whole,

We have created four lanes recombined

A stitched-together pair without a soul

Unnatural to how they were designed.

Yet on the street, despite how it looks strange

I have to say: it's better for the change.

Incandescence

The paradox of caring is the anger

The all-consuming fury that returns

Like aircraft taxiing back to the hangar

When what you care about is disrespected. Turns

Out that caring for what others don't is rough:

Especially when they pretend to care.

Pretensions uttered merely off-the-cuff

Prove, when the planes are flying, fully bare.

It is misfortune to believe sincerely;

A tragedy to mean the things you say.

For truer calm, you ought to mouth words merely

And let the thoughts behind them float away.

Yet I cannot renounce my care for leisure

As caring is a calling beyond measure.

Flying Saucer

If someone should descend out of the sky

And lecture us on what we ought to do

With careful reasons postulating why

Our current situation will not do;

If someone were to ride a trail of fire

Into the heavens, and come down to say

That our incessant pressure to acquire 

Has made the bed in which we now must lay;

If someone were to land, and to inform us

Of all the ways that we have wrecked our shit--

Attempt to redirect us, and to warn us

Of how our world is digging its own pit

I do not think we'd listen. Why would we?

There's proof already, if our eyes could see.

You do their work, and they shall have good luck

 If I were luckier than I have been

(Which is already lucky, I should say)

I have a premonition I would win

The lottery, and play it every day.

If I were fortunate (and so I am)

In ways exceeding what's already true

The government would think my luck a sham

Investigating everything I'd do.

So it is lucky, in an inverse sense,

That I do not possess eternal luck;

For in this world the only recompense

Of high good fortune is that fortunes suck:

We do not trust a good thing coming often

It's only for the outliers we soften.