Concrete Paradise

You comb the flowers,
brush the grass, pick
the earth clean and design
the streets running through it all.
This is a maze, this is
your concrete bed upon which we walk,
struggle, wander forward and
chase the wilderness all down.
It pays and it sells to develop soft recollections
of paradise, fake-Edens planted,
and weeded and trimmed and
mowed and painted and picked free
of undesirable life forms.
But still...
the sun is hot as it oozes down
the pavement, seeps through the gray
and reflects off the noise of
society in full throttle motion,
sliding forward into the
red lights of traffic,
paradise forever lost to us on
the other side of the
highway.