The Novelty of Future

Modernity and its discontents, I sigh, one day, too cold
for spring. Intoxicated on the guise of my hilarity,
I become a puppeteer of people. The frontier is dead
so we make our own in bars, the best of which are built like loops
to simulate distance traveled. Round and round; the Wild West
replaced by pubs, we, like children, riding on the plaster ponies
of a merry-go-round. -Isms are the enemy, we learn in class; so is
anonymity. Assigned seats are an artifice of home.
The steam engine, the locomotive, the clock: machines
have a way of making their own children. See the crazy train
on the trestle, the wound of an open mine, the belch of a smelter
huffing gilded hell. Divisions of matter and motion prevail
as new rulers of the universe; the edifice of a New World--
the Epoch of Avarice. But we the pioneers of west and endless
restlessness can only go in circles on the surface of a sphere.