Mulberries

June in the rustbelt and we’re raving drunkenly down the street trying to catch mulberries in our mouths as they fall, chomp chomp chomp their bloody juice and save them from the sidewalk, from smearing into oblivion in the bottom of someone’s uncaring shoe or some mangy dog’s concrete-coarsened paw pad, except our shrinks tell us we’re sane and our sponsors tell us we’re sober and that mange is easy to cure but we don’t care, we’re ravenous, we’re eating salads of toxic algae blooms we skimmed off the surface of this mighty nation’s Great Lakes and fruit cocktails from berries scrounged off trees and bushes flowering in the pestilent ruins of our once great industries and here’s one, a mulberry, gulp, except it tastes like spring not summer, like pollen and mudslides and black flies sucking our blood in the U.P. and gulp, another one, and this one too is unseasonably flavored, tastes of winter, knitting needles clacking in a brick rowhouse, Netflix ta-dumming into poorly-written sit-com life, and the fog isn’t Sandburg’s coming on little cat feet, it’s not even fog, it’s a smog of volatile organic compounds belched out of the cracker plant, but that’s ok, we don’t mind, we’re volatile organic compounds ourselves, like recognizes like, our necks heavily adorned with fordite pendants the size of Buick Electras and our teeth are made of COR-TEN steel weathered brown and gulp, this one is fall, of course, for nature and narratives love a pattern, and that’s ok because we’re fall people, we tell ourselves, our sponsors, our shrinks, we’re autumnal creatures, citizens of a decadent empire, and it tastes like papery leaves like Rilke like a pigskin bouncing off the hard November-frosted earth like a shock full of fodder like a family trampled on Black Friday like you and me in our brilliant senescence catching mulberries and raving drunkenly down the street in the rustbelt in June.