News Poetry: Of Diesels and Subterfuge

Of Diesels and Subterfuge

Ordinary Tuesday,
meaning evil & good are pulling
on different ends of the same serpent.
I am hardly bothered by their charade
anymore. I’ve got my own incubus
scurrying around inside, playing a zither
and releasing the gerbils from their cages.

Besides, I’m busy parsing the obituaries
when I see a headline about acres of cars
on the grasslands outside Colorado Springs,
at the base of Pike’s Peak. I remember
just last week riding past this site,
wondering WTF, and here in the Denver Post,
a story explaining—10,000 late model
Volkswagens & Audis guilty of falsehoods
bordering on subterfuge. How they
circumvented the sensors sensing pollutants
from their diesel engines. All guilty
of sins of emission.

And I feel now a certain sadness
at this automobile purgatory,
all the Touregs, Tiguans, Beetles & Golfs
waiting implacably with their more affluent
cousins, with short upper-class names,
like Q5 & A8, for a redemption that will
or will not come, biding time, hanging on,
here amidst the locusts and the sparrows,
a stone’s throw from the interstate
they still lust after.

 

Photo credit: davidd, Creative Commons, Flickr 

Frank H. Coons is a veterinarian and poet living in Colorado. His work has appeared in The Eleventh Muse, The Santa Fe Literary Review, Pilgrimage, Imprints, Pinyon Review, El Malpais, Fruita Pulp and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the Mark Fischer Prize in 2011 and 2013. His first collection of poems, Finding Cassiopeia was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award in 2013. His second book of poems, Counting in Dog Years has recently been released. Both books were published by Lithic Press.

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