Let’s note this boy

in a tail-tucked ball cap, scrubbing
his sausage-chub thumbs up
silent sinew strung up a 
Yamaha’s aching neck, some 
stumbling slur of every 
grumbling thud of contemporary 
                           country mumbling
clean through a blue tooth speaker; a-
nother boy, hooded or hoodened or
hiding his plight as a past-life ex-
ecutioner, cradling some strange gimble
or gibbet or wily contrivance repurposed
from Sade’s estate, a camera hanged
where the blade would’ve buoyed once,
taping, perchance, a promotional video—there,
 
on the corner of Mill and Vine, where both
of the village’s ersatz brutalist office
parks were poised like hideous twins, the
worst sort of setting for what was decoded as
some coarse cut of an incel hymnal hosed
and doused in delousing powder to
furnish a scurrying bedbug ballad
that shouldered the smoldering 
umber of Pine-Sol. I was left                     then
 
muttering, God, who are these people
who seemed to roll craps when it came to
aesthetics; perhaps, 
                                      no more than a 
gripping confession of which curled
corners and copestones scrunched
in my skull I was hoping some numb
and clumsy country surgeon        maybe could
dredge with gin and cut to the same,
small, smug exent that this
scene had seemed to
rattle within me.                                Everything
 
that I daren’t accept, 
receive, allow, or, cowering,
tolerate so 
much more a part of me maybe 
                than                 anything
 
I might meekly adventure                    to chew.
How grue here hoisted a glory a-
round my neck from which my
head might snap and my trem-
bling, tingling, L – bracket body might
bid on a better, less bitter director, oh,
 
one who could comb of this
same, small, smugly simpering 
scene struck over what seemed so 
untenably ugly and hustling
 
something I maybe might rhyme with
humor, truth, or beauty.