Suburban Chapter

poem from my old house on Windsor Ave.:



                     Suburban Chapter
   
                Municipal street maintenance boys
                cut the huge dying cedar out front
                as if it was so much refuse.
                From their boom buckets
                they jolly the day away
                as I watch a friend
                carried away by loud coroners.

                Strangled by a sloppy gas leak
                its choked roots succumbed under asphalt
                like a coal miner without legs.
                Malfeasance on an elder.

                Earlier in the week  up the nice street,
                under a burgeoning banana tree,
                a man’s body was dumped,
                tossed in the azaleas like a used six pack,
                his dress was torn.

                Tonight
                looping feline whines fissure the dark
                forcing my audience,
                boasting pathetic territory.
                Not far away, slipping from buses
                come the desperate, who sometimes
                accost gold watched men
                returning home
                as they park their maroon cars.
           
                Further east
                clapboard slung bungalows
                weather eighty-five years
                of particulate haze
                only to be pelted by semi-automatic bullets.
                Vertical irons manacle homes,
                unnoticed as seeds on a bun.

                But, angry old women still make their way
                to market,
                people walk their dogs
                putting fear aside,
                battling far worse odds on the freeway
                than the caustic curb outside.