Saturday, February 1, 2020

This movie made me remember that feeling

A boy is in the water
Where Pennsylvania and Ohio meet,
Where two sinister tides converge.
Abandoned entire residential blocks and former
Centers of industry, sources of gainful employment.

The tongue of his sneaker is moving in the current.
He is a part of this ecosystem.
The tides are methamphetamine and opiates,
And they have drowned a good percentage of the remainders.
The others move about as only hosts to their parasite.

She's on your front seat on a beautiful summer day,
Lovely thighs glistening in the sunshine in a rainbow striped dress,
Fifties rock n' roll hits playing on the radio.
She's napping in a stranger's car.
You cannot wake her.

You can get everything you need in one neat package
At the drive-up window of the liquor store.
Nobody's worried, nobody's hiding.
She sends you to the black folks dollar store
For hair ties and a very specific set of hair pins.

The other one, she bought a house on the Ohio side,
On a near ghost block for nine thousand dollars.
It's spare, but she travels for her business, so doesn't need much.
It's not a bad neighborhood, she says, unless you're scared of blacks,
But you can't really live here.

They voted for Trump here, the statistics say,
But I don't see anyone that would even know
Where to go for that, or when it happens.
I cannot imagine that they feel - or are - represented by any candidate.
When she returns after a long while, her eyes are bulging.

The high for me was what the other one said to me,
right there in the doorway, I replay it in my head sometimes.
Even outside this half-dead city, out in the sunshine and the strange fields of green
You can feel there's a horror on-going here,
A Beast being fed with Souls.

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