Category: Poetry

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.

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.

Dead of winter, shadowing down
streets as black as any nightmare,
although it wasn’t even time for supper.
“I got dizzy, Sweetie.”
“I knows Mama.”
She came home from school and found
her mother on the floor. Her baby
brother and sister stood there by her,
scared. They had gotten home first,
tried to lift her. Impossible when the
dead weight of the curse was on her.
They couldn’t find her pills. They
brought her blankets and pillows.
“Where’s your purse Mama?”
“I ain’t got no money, Honey.”
Her mother looked ashen, like the
embers of coal burned.
“I needs to get your medicine.”
“I ain’t got no more. I was going
to the drugstore.”
Her purse was on the floor, right
next to her, covered by the blanket.
There were no more pills in the vile
she kept tucked away at its bottom.
“I get you a refill.” She pocketed the
container. “You two sup on that lunch
meat wrapped up in the fridge.” She told
her siblings. “Get Mama some tea. I
bring you back some candy.”
By now every predator was out there,
prowling through the icy dark: rapists,
muggers, gangbangers, killers. She
pulled on her winter coat, cap, mittens.

THE HOUR OF THE STAR

Twins night ride a see-saw as storm

clouds gather over them.  Each catches

a glimpse, in turn, above the other, of a

star on the horizon.  The grim one ponders

hers and finds profound insights through it.

The happy one peeks at her own bewildered

and bemused until it finally shines on her

too.  It is the star of life, for one magic,

for the other a wonder of science and physics.

Each, identical in every way except for the

way their brains were arranged, balances and

enables the other in their teeter-totter journey

to nowhere. As they ride up and down under

the clouding night sky, the grim one sees that

soon her star will vanish in the storm.  Her

sibling will see that too but only when hers

is covered and is gone. The lonely cry of a

train’s whistle wails by like a one note lullaby.