What Have we Really Learned

Before this, before this civilization came here, before the first towns and schools, the river flowed and fed this valley with mountain minerals, meandered free and flooded yearly. This land breathed, but it is desert now. Armored and impervious to rain and sun; pressed upon, by concrete and asphalt, worried over by the passing of ten ton trucks and the vacant steps of preoccupied pedestrians.
This land sleeps and dreams of weeds growing in cracks; licks the oily rain that seeps through fractures in the white lined black skins of parking lots and tire worn freeways.
I was sitting there, on this land, under a concrete marvel overpass. Above me, a broad way flew frozen; a multi-million dollar umbrella that shelters the homeless, who smoke borrowed cigarettes as they file the minutes off long, listless days.
A block away flowed a hurried metal river of whizzing cars and whooshing trucks, while sparse weeds waved from the cars-going-by gusts.
I was sitting on flattened card board boxes in the company of a tin can ashtray (so as to keep the view pristine), while the shackled bones of tarred trees tirelessly held wires that feed information and electricity into sharp-edged buildings. At my feet lapped the frozen asphalt parking pond and turned to rock and then skyward; an engineering marvel, burden on stout pillars that press insistent into the belly of the dreaming land.
A young man approached, cigarette in hand, cradling a book. He sat smoking nervously, flicking the ashes overmuch as he ingested the words of the book. He seemed oblivious to the thunderous passing of a freight train; burdened and graffitied box cars with tortured steel wheels grinding on screeching metal tracks, endless passing, car after car like segments of a mile long screaming centipede. On one of the cars was written in white, flowery cursive script: "i never really learned anything."