cursed children, rotten days
Cursed children, rotten days.
I sit in a somber light staring out a rain drenched window
onto a landscape written over with runes and hieroglyphs,
and other cryptic scatterings of leaves, brown and red,
as little rivulets form and are erased in my viewing,
tumbling down the usually gentle decline of the street.
The light of an overhead lamp, slightly yellow,
casts dimly at the ground illuminating little,
the muck, the swampy catch all drain,
smelling of cast off pinafores from greasy saloons
and waitresses paying off that last student loan.
Somewhere down the way, up a little from my door,
a clothesline has been bared in the wind, knuckle white,
and with the aprons soggy trousers and unmentionables
now conspire to clog the drain, along with old newspapers
and forgotten vinyl record covers, and other archaisms.
It’s like archaeology in reverse, like Mount Rainier erupting,
laying down, in predictable patterns all squished and contorted,
the lasagna of castoffs, the storm came on pick up day,
with tumbled bins, filled to brims with water
bubbling out their former contents into the miasma.
