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.
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.
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