the baggy tumbleweeds are now listless across the tarmac

Carried by the death-rattle of god's cluttered trachea

in a crooked civic neck that can crane no longer,
  the baggy post-modern tumbleweeds

  that were spun of the hydrocarbon barb

  and hooked our hands and carried our shopping so conveniently
  for decades and minutes
    now blow listless across the reticent tarmac
    through streets of naïve cement, and down

    down into netherworld gutter grills and sewage river mouths.

Laying thick the plaque and lint
of tomorrow's impossible forever floss,
the sediment of our invented flesh confetti
scleroses in the lining of life's improvised plumbing.

How we heave and marvel at the great hubristic fatbergs
of sloppy pop and engorged engineering. Heave
and marvel at subterranean monuments to failed rebellion,
failed catharsis, failed purgation,
as inadvertent plastic statues sink like Atlantis
under the collapsing gravity of their own production.
Statues that masquerade 

as progress on the goldfish treadmill of ideas and impulsive half-imagination.
We the top feeders. We the litterers,
trying to improve upon the ages of stone and bronze.

And so to the hard mistakes we hold within us:
these immortal particles of wishful thinking,
clogging the free-willed bifurcations of our collective vasculature.
These ubiquitous, crystalline shards

of the Snow Queen's black molding mirror,

that cling to our lung, sporulating wildly,

and whose warped reflections,

make even the loveliest landscapes look like boiled spinach.

And the self-professed heroes of our generation choose 

the microscopic spectacle of clandestine war

and the fleeting gore of a glorious broken-nosed fist fight

that bleeds onto the world like boiling amber.
While terraced batteries of clucking neighbours,
sit in concertinas of chaste little English castles, crumbling
like sand under the risk of precarious capital, or imploding

in the vacuum of absent community, amid circular pecking orders and
the auspices of opportunistic ring leaders,
that parasitose from the pointed comfort of pyramid peaks.

We half-live, with the rippling pectoral threat of the long arm
and the droning remote controlled little blue men,
who fast-track the intoxicated visionaries to the dumpster
and work to force the exploding seeds of searing truth back into their boxes,
containing the madness that rises to the occasion,
when the only way we may make our mark on the world,
is to make scars of ourselves and reject
the endless plugs and sockets and the babbling rubber voices
between our ears, in our heads, planted there by lifeless buds.
Anything but drip-dry-compliance.

With the dust of dirty centuries
still thick in the air, we choke newly
on the opaque decadence of Teflon and Gore-Tex;
juvenile and mythic protectors against earth,
water, wind and fire. We choke
on the ethereal insolvents of perfluorotributylamine
and sulphur hexafluoride, clear as an injury,
and wait for a new hero to arrive with a mop and bucket.
Wait for the angels or the demons to arrive and take us away.
Instead, only the reassuring dead end of mortality
and no conclusion. Not even a full stop.
Not even an altar at which to scream.

And then the plughole says to me
"when all walls are mirrors, the world takes on a kaleidoscopic shape"