Ghost Town Poem by Louis Kasatkin

Smashed glass alley rain swept,
boarded storefront windows,
chainlocked factory gates,
broken streetlamp neighbourhoods;
sour tastes of failure,
slothful mornings embittered
with inadequate rage choking
in throats too tired to scream;
meagre ranks of the not unemployed,
raking over the embers of irreplaceable tradition,
like red-coated sentries at Rorke's Drift
waiting waiting for the day to close,
and the sorrows of the town
to be left idling like abandoned reactors,
melting down to their core;
unquiet night slithering frost crawling,
across glass canopied neon catacombs,
home to vacant stares of the dealers,
vacant intimacies of the crowd's camaraderie,
kindled by too much booze not enough booze,
before waking again and again,
in the smashed glass alley rain swept.