PARADISE

Paradise is an unincorporated
Township in Clark County, NV.
It contains the Strip and its airport.
The etymology of this ‘Paradise’…

Originates, not with the word for
A Persian garden, but with the name
Of a 1940’s Casino, A Pair of Dice.
Nothing here is quite what it seems.

Vegas is Israel without the Med:
An exotic, invasive urban weed
That has colonized the Mojave
And its indigenous peoples.

To walk along the Strip is to
Be interrupted by stairways to
Aerial malls, linking hotel to hotel.
Within these vast blocks of schlock…

Crowded gambling halls and bars
Act as the City’s digestive tract
Absorbing the hard-earned cash
Of its unhappily hapless visitors.

But from my hotel window
I can see the distant mountains
Washed by dawn’s rosy glow and
Later, evening’s petrochemical haze.

Paradise is thus forever tempered
By the gravitas of the desert -
An eternally stoic land suffering
An excrescence in its midst.