THE SOCIAL CRISIS

by William Doreski

My real estate has flowered
so I'm going to deadhead it
by tearing down all the houses
and reverting the land to waste.

The land has always obeyed me,
the hills cringing like sultry curs,
the shy rivers sheltered by hemlocks.
But the houses sprouted children

who smoke at the age of nine
and curse into their cell phones
with long rancid strings of spittle.
At twelve, brother and sister

merge in beefy couplings priests
applaud because the government
has finally damned abortion,
setting monsters loose in the woods.

To solve this crisis I've chosen
to evict my sleazy tenants
and bulldoze the houses and heap
their possessions in bonfires

twenty feet tall. The sheriff
will help. His deputies will pry
apart the coupled siblings,
will pack the families in vans

and truck them to Vermont or Maine
where trailers lent by the governments
squat behind strip malls. The smoke
of burning rubble will drift for miles

and signal my purpose. The landscape
will heal in a couple of decades,
pine forest reclaiming itself
and big deadly mushrooms underfoot

lurching from the compromised soil
in memory of those children
and black bears scraping for maggots
with paws as stubby as clubs.