He took the Greyhound to the dying
town and rented a cheap room near the
factories – most of which, he found,
were dead and empty things. He called
the plant he once worked at, long ago
before his stint in the army, before his
discharge sent him back out into the
world, wandering. It had come to that,
even though he knew in life there is no
going back. A long shot at best, he was
hoping he could connect with someone
who remembered him from the past.
Mute point. They weren’t hiring, didn’t
expect to be, might be down sizing, or
closing completely, like every other
place in the vicinity. The same people
walked the streets – hardscrabble
working class families. Only no one
was working and the buildings were
decaying and all you saw on each face
was that look of quiet desperation. You
can’t go home again. You can’t stay
there either. We are all nomads, now, in
a no man’s land; not even looking for,
or expecting to find, our own private
little Garden of Eden, each day a
blessing, in which to live our lives.
Author: Rex Sexton
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Dead End
-
Night Watch
Out of the black,
star-domed unknown,
nothingness rushes in with a scream,
a shrieking, circular, no more,
which mangles the jungle night with flames.Vietnam and napalm,
fear death agony destruction
and all for nothing!Slanting forward, I slash the canvas
with colliding colors, fractured planes,
splintered perspectives, blood-red rhythms,
writhing soldiers, twisted trees,
(gray hair soaked with sweat,
old clothes splattered with paint)
a crazy conflagration of distorted shapes,
which looks like nothing so much
as a Hieronymus Bosch on hash,
(or maybe some asylum inmate’s “art therapy” piece)
destined, when it’s done, for an exhibit at the
Vietnam Veterans Museum, thinking of Iraq
as I lash away and of the roadside-bombed soldiers,
I read about everyday, reassigned to graves …“Art tells us the truth about being human.”
I remember reading in one of my art criticism books.
So does a bullet.
-
Haunted
HAUNTED
From night to day to night again
the clock’s hands grasp illusions.
Love knows nothing of time.
Love knows passion, fever, reaching
for someone to hold onto forever.
Like a sorceress, or prankster witch,
you left your memory in the dark to
haunt me each night when I turn out
the lights. I sleep with ghosts, dream
of you, wake up with shadows.
What went wrong? Who’s to blame?
Why does love fade away, when hand
in hand through good and bad, side by
side through thick and thin,
sharing laughter, joy and pain, you
wake up from a dream and all you
were died that day? -
The Big Chill
Days bleak, bitter with winter.
No heat in their building, night
coming quickly, Manny’s wife
stoic, kids colic, “holding money”
gone with the economy.
“I prowl streets.” Manny tells me.
“Ghostly with all these drifts,
past shut down workshops,
factories. STOCKS SOAR,
BANKERS OPTOMISTIC,
UNEMPLOYMENT FIGURES
DISAPPOINTING, HOUSES STILL
FORECLOSING. Tattered newspapers
flutter down the walks grabbing at
Manny’s steps like specters haunting
the Philly sidewalks. I know, I’ve
been there and when you finally get
home at the end of each payless day,
the houses in your working class
neighborhood, which hasn’t seen
work since 2008, seem to huddle
together like headstones in a
graveyard. I’ve walked those streets
too. Where every street sign
seems to read DEATH’S ROW
instead of Pine, Maple, Elm and
Oak. And there’s no going back
to what was before, because it
isn’t there anymore. -
House of Blues
Where there’s plenty of bad news, which the lost girl at the Honky Tonk piano wails about, tearing your heart out, as she sings her tales of a cold and heartless world, amidst the drunken toasts, smary jokes, cigarette smoke, asking what can you do when no one follows the Golden rule? Or where can you go when you’re down and there’s no way out? Or when will true love conquer all? Is there any love in the world at all?
You sit, drink, try try not to think. But the lost girl is like the shadow you though you erased when you slipped into this dark place, crying out to your soul everything you needed to escape and don’t want to know.
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