Fun Run For Progress Poem by Artchil Daug

They run, moving forward,
as gazelles, jumping over mountains,
past oceans of agriculture, near lakes
of suburban shacks, temporary Roman villas
that can vanish in smoke,
a badly positioned fart on eyes
deaf and beyond description,
running, steam locomotives, lost
in the provincial sunrise, hostage,
those ignorant fidelities in hill camps, embers
of an infantile disease, covered,
dressed in bourgeois Teflon coatings,
unchanged within, nihilistic newly colored rose,
undeniably native, a steamship in two decks,
decades ago, still not throwing its anchors,
flying over graveyards, subdivisions,
with their customary chapels, without
the cemented crucifixes, engines running
methamphetamine photo galleries,
snapshots, advanced artificial intelligence,
running on bridges, sandy, ivy,
technological bulldozers, piledrivers, hollow
constructs of fleeting dreams
leaving me as a symbol, a monument
of bygone days, when running meant
something other than a fun run.