the smell of distant firewoks, the spilled and broken world

[alice wellintown]

So the bad Ninjamobile swept along
on the great Ventura, among Olympic
visitors from everywhere who teemed
all over the freeway system in midday
densities till far into the night,
shined-up, screaming black
motorcades that could have carried
any of several office seekers, cruisers
heading for treed and more gently
roaring boulevards, huge double and
triple trailer rigs that loved to find
Volkswagens laboring up grades and
go sashaying around them gracefully
and at gnat's-ass tolerances, plus
flirters, deserters, wimps and pimps,
speeding like bullets, grinning like
chimps, above the heads of TV
watchers, lovers under the
overpasses, movies at malls letting
out, bright gas-station oases in pure
fluorescent spill, canopied beneath the
palm trees, soon wrapped, down the
corridors of the surface streets, in
nocturnal smog, the adobe air, the
smell of distant fireworks, the spilled,
the broken world.



This time the pitcher of education had gone to the fountain
once too often; it was fairly broken; and the young man had
got to meet a hostile world without defense -- or arms.

        --Henry Adams