An Alien World

For miles at a time
All you could see
Was ground and sky

Like floating on top
Of a land ocean
Rolling waves of brown

Traversed by truck
On patchy pavement
Gravel spitting roads

Guided by power poles
Lined up like dominoes
No billboards or signs*

An occasional buoy
Street moniker to guide
From complete disorientation

Silos and mega barns
Dot the landscape
Rising and sinking

With the roll of the tide
No shore to stop
Just heaving and breathing

Bringing to the surface
All the food that we eat in its
Purest form of nutrition

Before being processed
Preserved and packaged
To nearly inedible form




The above was my attempt at a poetic description of some recent far-out far out deliveries I made through vast ranges of farm land. Where, if it were not for GPS and an app telling how to get to my destinations, I’d still be lost.

Not the typical farmland seen from the interstate highways and byways. Rather massive patches of land squared off in grids, between the four lane concrete corridors.

Corporate and colony run farms, counting mostly on nature to water the crops.

Miles of maternal mammaries of a loving mother earth feeding her offspring, suckling every last drop as she ceaselessly gives. Though she is exhausted and abused and nary a card for mother’s day. Shame on us.
Rest and restoration is out of the equation.

“And I make her prove her love for me,
I take all that I can take
And I push her to the limit
To see if she will break

She might take it back,
She could take it back some day”

– Pink Floyd

“Take It Back” from The Division Bell



* The one sign I occasionally saw was

Election signs for Sheriff



W T F


Sheriff……..out here in this alien world
Miles from alleged civilization where if
You needed some “authority” to do????
It would be hours before the Sheriff
Could get there to do absolutely nothing

Seriously, in five hours of mostly driving
I saw three tiny patches of civilization
Covering a fifty mile square area of land

Better elect an authority for “protection”

We are so strangled
By the indoctrinated
Thought rope we hang
Around our neck
It is a wonder
We can breathe at all

Do these people honestly believe
Matt Dillon is going to ride up
On a horse and execute justice
If someone steals a potato??

At least if it were Andy of Mayberry
He could do a thorough investigation
Since Andy Taylor never carried a gun

As I write this it is still baffling
The need and or want of a Sheriff
On what seemed like another planet

Engaging in a process of “electing”
An outside “authority”, simply because
No one recognizes their own
Individual authority within the collective
When it is what they pretend to have
While saying it is something they want

FREEDOM

A lot of money, time, timber and paper
Went in to buying posters, building
Ground level half billboard size signs
To a small, scarce, ineffective audience

Ruining an otherwise pleasant drive
Having quickly realized there was
Not any distracting reading material
Nor miles to the next exit or turn-off
Or closest and approaching cities
Gas stations, hotels and restaurants

In my eighteen wheel land rover
Exploring the alien world I landed on


“Just an observation,
Maybe I need
A different telescope.”

– Angelo Devlin