Sidewalk Chalk

The young go by smoking small-town morning glories.

 

Wrestling

With the existential crises in their knapsacks and purses

pockets�"my hand in yours your hand in mine�"

Folds of their clothes and tissue paper shoved in the toes of their shoes.

That were too big but that they couldn’t resist buying.

 

What fills up the holes in us?

 

I see them carrying sandwich signs

“SUCCESS AND HOW TO GET IT”

on their shoulders. No one knows what it means

or if they even want it to mean and so they slip out from

 

the

heavy

weight

 

leave it on the sidewalk to be buried under empty beer bottles

and hand-rolled cigarettes. Except

on the other side of the street are the proud toters of

“SUCCESS: GOTTEN IT”

written across their foreheads in the blood of their dreams.

 

Success pelts strung from their belts.

 

Congratulations! Scream from the eyes of the people they hope to impress.

Successes bought

And tied

And caught

And fried

And trussed

And mussed

And drained and maintained

with cruel attention paid to dead things.

You don’t impress me.

 

Maybe I’m jealous of your wing dings your taxidermied achievements

displayed on your mantles in the drawing room.

Maybe I’m afraid you will kill me too,

so I nod my head and drink my tea faster to escape

the clammy suffocating claustrophobia of the room.

 

Mr. Green in the conservatory with the shovel�"

he beat poor Mr. Erskine’s head in because he just would not behave like a normal

Member of society.

Mr. Green said in a statement later that he

“did what had to be done.

This malevolent strain of un-cooperation could not be allowed to continue.”

Mr. Erskine is survived by no one but his extensive record collection and a letter

From a friend

because he refused to get a wife and a well-paying acceptable job and a litter of pups.

The job being not to provide a sense of well-being and personal enjoyment/fulfillment but

to maintain the wife and pups.

 

The cleaners of death stamped an L for Loser on his forehead when they carried him out

And threw him on the heap of Thoreau’s demolished house and used Whitman’s leaves

to cover him up.

 

That was a well-done murder, everyone nodded. Can’t have those sillies running

Around. They might copulate and produce offspring just like them.

They already

Have.

I said. I’m not sorry to say.

I am one of them.

And I run out under a hailstorm of dishes thrown at my head.