[Poem] The Wet Ghost Town

2008-09-17 @ 11:23 p.m.

houses line the streets like
slump-shouldered sad-faced people in a bread line
tired -- no, exhausted,
leaning,
hollow, dark, windows without glass stretching wide
to reveal an uninhabited empty
collection
of walls and floors and ceilings
and the front porch roof
has given up.

ghost town
not a soul
in sight
and

the water's gone now,
it ran like a red-handed bandit leaving
pictures tilted on the walls
of an antique shop,
filthy, ruled with water-lines,
paintings of babies with blond butter hair
and flowers
that seem so out-of-place in the ruins;
in the bank the flag hangs limp
but not lifeless,
touched on the edge with grime
and pristine above, crisp and new.

the vaults are open, empty.
the clock keeps time for nothing and no one,
hanging, grinning, from the wall,
surprised that it
has so much time
to itself.

paint cracked and peeling
is blistered
as if hands from hell touched them there;
the glossy white puckers,
cracks,
falls in flakes to the dusty, moldy floorboards.

the streets are like a jungle;
delinquent flowers creep from their neatly-tended beds,
vines reaching for purchase on an abandoned terrain forbidden before,
throwing bright colors around like parade candy,
unashamed,
for no one's here to see;

the grasses are wild, running rampant,
exhilarated now that they do not live
in fear of the whirring
whirling
warring blades of the lawnmower.

sidewalks, still lined with silt-fine mud
stretch along the streets,
languishing and lonely
because there are no feet to visit them,

and the windows that stare blindly over the road
at the houses on the other side
have exploded,
shattering,
leaving broken bits of glass like piles of diamonds,
like tears wept from the buildings' eyes
in mounds on the concrete.

it's a ghost town,
a wet ghost town,
left withered and wanting and worried
and barren.
the flood has gone,
but so have the people,
so has the life.

in the corner of a rebellious garden
where the flowers are taking advantage
of their
newfound
freedom,
a white-faced girl kneels, stone eyes blank and staring,
a basket on her knees
the sole inhabitant of this forgotten place,
silt and weeds still stuck to her hair.