Awareness Provocated

Awareness Provocated
A tourist's eye tears up
Looking down at a foreign human spectacle
Walled in by ditches piled high ...
With the laundry of vagrants
And accompanying rejection notices
Hastily scribbled on vulgar parchment;
All observed through a barrier
Of tourist bus windows.
Mud-streaked faces
Stained with unmistakable sad
Failed to escape his notice,
Contrasts too vast to contemplate,
Those with his home's neighbors'
Pre-adults crashing college kid keg parties
In a different flavored neighborhood.
Hunting for answers to tragic world reality
Competed for most probable unsuccess,
The challengers being an expedition,
Hunting wild elephants with Hasbro dart guns.
The traveler, feeling buttock fatigue
On seats too stubborn to give way
To an average man's weight
Lost hold of his self image.
Smudge-like, reflections mimicking
The long ago reflections found
In resin-caked bong glass.
Symptoms of this nature were children
Of a society fermenting like spoiling fruit,
Even bedroom mirrors were infamously two faced.
The climate hosted suburban pillows
Who tattled wickedly on their respective
Above-the-neck jockeys.
The obscenity made a laughing stock
Of formidable disgust brought on
By the insane 'what-if' day dreaming;
A Flintstone and Rubble swinger's night.
The bus wheels' ball-bearings
Continued their grind out of the cage
Keeping poverty's greatest numbers
And into places that Opened up wide
Like a canyon vista on plains
Arrow-straight as railroad ties
Stretching across country prairie.
If nothing else, a compulsion was born
To garner efforts securing
Front-cover to back-cover inertia
For a book he remembers
Awakened his consciousness from
A decades dead apathetic slumber.