Author: Rex Sexton

Razor sliced clean – his too-quick smile
was your bad dream.
At night, in the Hood, when the street lights
glowed, blood flowed. Sometimes you
could hear the screams.
Razor was a friend of mine
He would slice you anytime
For nickel or a dime
Fifty cents for overtime
Stop the poem! This next stanza is a
disclaimer! I never knew anyone named
Razor! Or any other psychopath who
would steal, cheat, murder for profit
or pleasure! I’m making this up!
(Can’t get bumped off or sued by a whacko!)
OK, I grew up in a slum. But I moved on.
I saw nothing, heard nothing, remember
nothing, know nothing.
I keep company, now, with the cream of
society: bankers, brokers, politicians,
the titans of industry and commerce.
Maybe I shouldn’t write about them either?

Summer heat, the town asleep,
I walk empty streets in the
hallowed light of a full moon
night. Above me, the stars sparkle
like gems in the heavens.
All around me a jubilee is celebrated
by the crickets as they perform their
nocturnal rhapsody – to accompany
the lullaby the hushed wind whispers
through the leaves of the trees which
canopy the winding lanes which
wander up and down the hills and
dales of our small town.
Come the dawn is there a reason to
go on? I wonder.
The days shall go on: full moon,
new moon, Autumn, Winter, Spring,
Summer again, world without end.
Round and round the planet circles
the sun, time passes on, life moves
along.
Tomorrow morning the Plant shuts
down. Our lives shut down and soon
comes a ghost town.

It doesn’t take a lightning bolt or
cosmic jolt to spark the dark side
of womankind and change an angel
to a she-devil and transform that shy
child who never thought to be wild
into a wanton adventuress eager to
exchange those gentle pastels for a
firey red dress.
It doesn’t take a potent concoction
from a witches caldron, a love potion
or occult incantation, a voodoo spell
or the old “candy is dandy but liquor
is quicker” mantra to unveil the
feminine mystique and send it
dancing in a midnight dress through
an ecstacy of black magic madness.
It doesn’t take sorcery, but whispered
sweet nothings and a loving touch.

In my cheap room, lit by a TV screen,
after I climb five flights, each night,
up a stairway to nowhere, I sit and
stare at Hollywood daydreams, which
feature movie queens, heros and villans,
happy endings. Each one showing, that
in the USA, the bad guys lose, truth wills
out, the righteous win — which keeps us
going. It’s how we survive these hard
times, as we sip our beers and eat our
popcorn in a world that’s broken.
Even in this dead town where misery
abounds, and jobs can’t be found, and
what was up crashed down, like so many
Humpty Dumptys who can’t be put back
together again, not even by our constitution,
nor our institutions, or our business leaders,
rabbis, priests and preachers, nor our
politicians, who all have other eggs to break
and fry, as they scramble those happy
endings for their busy lives. Which have
nothing to do with our sorry stories, because
they don’t have to live them. They don’t
even have to watch them. They can select
another station. They inhabit another nation.