Attention Span

The teenage boys, smoking on the parking ramp
proving each to each who’s horniest of the bunch,
not really by anything they say, but by an attitude of standing.

There are enough strollers in sight for a stroller factory,
and enough babies for an orphanage, or a nursery.
Abandonment or growth, both alive here among the many
futures to be lived. The shops counting their numbers,
and the crowds throwing theirs away, and still their children weep,
but not for anything in particular.

It’d be clichéd if it weren’t true.
It’d be stale but their hypocrisy is mine.
And that lesson we must learn, but don’t
or won’t, not in time
that in between getting rich and wasting away
is a road where the leaves are bursting
with red and orange, brown and gold,
where the wind breathes onto the night.