(Wind chill -38)
Winter City? Frozen North? (fact)
Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”
or Sam McGee incarnate.
Too bloody cold for rats.
Snow blown across Xmas potholes.
Someone else’s bad dream
rammed down a senior’s throat
like feckless mayors, windrows
or snow-covered bike-lanes.
City of arena-sized illusions
and forever extinct teams
awaiting the mercy of exorcism.
Awaiting the day when the power
conks out for gutted grid-hours
and all will simply freeze and die:
pets, plants, taps, houses, taxpayers.
Or else as some huddle in their monster trucks
idling the pipe-dream mirage
until all that PC gas runs out.
…………………………………..
This one has become relevant again as EPCOR threatens several neighborhoods with power outages for a minimum of 2 hours and as long as several hours until January. The lack of common sense about this frozen North metropolis borders on extreme nerviness, absurdity, greed, public irresponsibility, and denial.
Also, a fan threw his sweater and phone on the ice in disgust after the Oilers` first home game (an unnecessary loss). He obviously feels that exorcism may still be necessary even though the ground has finally been broken for the new arena.
Poem notes:
AB is professed to be rat-free, but there are too many feckless mayors in this burg and rat-like provincial politicians (bow-tied-clown Mandel again, claiming no new Mis hospital (the current one a crumbling joke) is necessary. Lord help AB Health and Albertans all.
The senior citizen allusion is to that poor schmo who had enormous windrows dumped in front of his place and was then told he had to shovel out by the City.
The bike lanes symbolize a major Mandel-Iveson folly and massive waste of public funds for their own personal agendas. Lanes used by less than 1% of the population in summer and a handful of diehard-idiots in winter. fact: Far more cyclists prefer the safety (not for pedestrians, though) of sidewalks over the very dangerous bike lanes.