THE POEM IS A GLASS HOUSE

into which the speaker retreats after flinging his stockpile of stones. Once there, he celebrates his hypocrisy with a whiskey (it "makes [his] downfall sexy"). On the rocks? He'll throw those too.

A GLASS HOUSE IS AN ARCHITECTURE OF CONFESSION

Google my college
girlfriend and find her

INSIDE WHICH WE SHAME OURSELVES

on the steps of an expensive
Chicago townhouse

AND/OR SHAME OTHERS

via silent observations vindications:

[with] her blonde husband who
looks like a low-level Nazi

OR THE POEM IS A GLASS HOUSE MISSILE SILO:

cordoned off by "the handsome strangers of the Internet" and a couple dozen sawhorses. I sense Neely's stones are uranium-enriched. The speaker calls the bomb "dirty" as if, through the magic of a modifier, he can disavow his complicity. He knows, though: once the pinball is launched, no amount of delicate flipper play will prevent it from being ingested by the waiting maw of the out hole. An adjective doesn't change a thing, so here is the poet fretting futility. The speaker searches "for the perfect / video the silent bloom / of Little Boy over / Hiroshima." This is the slight relief new media extends to us: we are permitted the unlikely vantage of zenith, but we have to remind ourselves: even at zenith, it's still our bomb to bear.

OR THE POEM IS A GLASS HOUSE GOOSE

and Neely's sign reads:

THESE MONSTERS
ARE LOVELY TO THE LORD
in the other hand
[his] slingshot
and pouch of stones

THE ARCHITECT WORKS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS

building a life for others, but then retiring to the woods, to "pine trees shivering / like addicts on the mountain." 

THE SOAPBOX IS A METAPHOR OF VISIBILITY TOO—

not because of its transparency, but its ability to elevate the speaker. It allows him to be more obviously seen. Consider anapodoton (Greek for "without a main clause"), a fragment that strongly implies. As in: "If the soapbox fits..."

From up there, Neely's speaker implores the "nation's youth." It's sincere, if crotchety:

your hair is ludicrous
no one needs
another photo of you drinking from a Solo cup
you may be our only hope
so put down the fucking phone and drive...

It echoes the last tercet of Creeley's "I Know a Man," when not-John entreats the chatterbox speaker to:

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

Neely's plea, though, is politicized, undergirded with:

your government is killing children in your name

 

THE SOAPBOX IS SECRETLY A MECHANICAL BULL

conspiring to buck the speaker to the dirt. It's artificially intelligent pine that knows Neely's watched more movies than he has read great works of literature (e.g., "the Russians"), i.e., the soapbox knows how lite he is.

I may have exaggerated certain things

THE SOAPBOX IS EASIER SAID THAN DONE

so occasionally, the speaker must "jump down from [his] soapbox." Besides, "who would want to be the mayor of this shitty town" anyway? An ill-advised campaign slogan, but a resonant rally cry. This is what happens when opportunity is squandered. How dare they deconstruct the old Burger King only to replace it with "another goddamn Burger King." This speaker wants to incite something more than a rally in the Rust Belt, though.

dear dirty bomb
there's no riot

The apparent end-stop of this couplet is supplanted by secret enjambment:

like the present

"There's no riot" becomes a hybrid construction—a declarative and an anapodoton (a strongly-implying fragment), semantically inverted. Either/or. Reader decides.

BY HURLING THE SOAPBOX AT THE GLASS HOUSE, ONE DESTROYS TWO USELESS WAYS OF SEEING OTHERS;

"[getting] the fuck off Facebook" is a third. He'll sign up again when Facebook learns to simulate his "father smoking Winstons at the kitchen table." Until then, the speaker aspires to "turn this garbage into art," to keep scheming the new American idiom.  

[LL]