Refugees

       

They walk down small empty streets

with ruined houses.

The clock in the square has no hands.

Rats at the end of the alleys

eat their dead,

the grind of their teeth in the flesh

the only interruption

of the humid afternoon

silence of retreat.

No more drive-by,

not the carts full of plague

long gone to shallow graves

and cried over,

not the car bombings, no Jihad,

only crippled insurgents

left with limbless occupiers

only gray lines of brutal aging

slow lifeless exit,

and in the undisturbed

brick and limestone

everything quietly waiting

for the nocturnal,

the gutters to run clear

and shadows begin to crawl

as innocence tries again

to sneak in, to root,

to find an infant footing

Dreamboat

         

going the wrong way

on the Baltimore beltway,

choking on carb-flooded gas -

over-heating over first date curfews

as we left Carlin’s Drive-In

already an hour late.

a death trap ’60 Falcon [appropriately black]

was not only my first car

but the first on the drug store corner -

made him a celebrity,

and yes definitely a ‘He’-

lost half the time, on the make the other….

anyway He’s straining brittle-bone ball-joints

and bald tires while I’m keeping

right white buck and pedal to the floor,

rubbernecking to spot that landmark…

that yes-we-now-know-where-we-are

building or corner.

‘the little engine that could’

all the time switching channels,

constantly on alert for the right hot tune

or ‘Wild Thing’

or anything by the Stones

which was always right.

your father home cursing hippies to your mom

belting shots of bourbon

would have been loading his gun

and waiting in the driveway

if he had seen the feature from our back seat

and those coming attractions in your hair.