Obscurity roams like a vanishing herd.
Signs of laughter play it by ear,
starting nowhere, the gray doesn’t say.
Traffic lights obtain mid-air
like tribal taboos. Chaos is virile.
Aircraft aloft come on mundane
and lose the name of action on a mountain,
salting the scene with morsel and machine.

Discrepancies go by: cars are ostensible
behind the whites of their eyes.
Symbols are seen where none were intended:
bridges, short on goals, compromise
and go halfway. A steeple, given
to proving its point, absconds to heaven.

Los Angeles author VAHAN GREGORY KRIKORYAN was one of Tom McGrath’s original L.A. Poets 5 in the ‘50s. Gregory was in Martha Foley’s Best American Short Stories 1953, and his 1974 novel Oh Boy, Here Comes Walt! was called “a minor classic” by Robert Kirsch of the L.A. Times.