Empire Chaos

5:53 Sunday Morning in Empire.

Gray skies, drizzle as lint.

Elmer and I on the move.

Discarded shoes everywhere,

pairs from the homeless.

Sneakers, loafers, slippers.

Why?

Why sometimes only one shoe?

A Zen koan never answered by10,000 monks.

As the old axiom goes:

I’ve walked in these discovered shoes,

many years now.

They’re almost shot,

sole shredding,

holes in the mesh,

stitches unraveling.

We pass two men smoking something in a red sedan.

We pass a homestead carved into a hedge.

A young black man with a sizable afro

rides a bicycle towing a trailer contraption

with a fishing rod sticking out the back.

He’s coasting fast to the boat ramp.

He stops beside the 40-year-old Bounder RV

with three orange tow tags peeling off a panel.

He leans the bicycle and trailer against the RV.

He carries a tackle box.

He places it on the parking lot,

approaches the open driver-side window

of the Bounder, climbs through,

opens the front door, emerges,

lights a cigarette,

starts doing something inexplicable

with shit around the rig.

Parking lot packed.

Forty boat trailers, more trucks and boats arriving.

Families prep to clam.

Seven dollar coffee drinks

kept warm inside space age containers.

A kid cries.

Dad threatens violence.

I hear terrible music.

Big black dog runs wild in a field.

A woman sitting in a chair wails

alongside the Park Host’s RV.

Black man yells “Shut the fuck up!”

Fisherman goes up to her.

I can’t hear his words.

More wailing.

She’s drowning the sound of ospreys chirping overhead.

Elmer and I hit the beach.

Smoke swirling from the encampment.

New tent,

new pile of firewood.

new shopping cart

toppled, charred

from barbecuing

roadkill raccoon.

Disembodied voices screaming profanities in the willows.

We’ll have to pass close by,

but we don’t.

I whip us around,

head home,

angry,

robbed this early morning on Coos Bay

of what I need to

contest the utter crush of American civilization

as Jim Harrison so accurately described it.