When Poets Come Home In A Huge Used Overcoat Drinking A Large Bottle Of Whiskey, Poem by Romella Kitchens

everything is so little.
The fairground has closed.
There aren't any ponies or prize goats
anymore.
Stallions were sold to the meat company
Odd lights blink a rejecting future.

The large part of the city is now criminal.
Murders before your very eyes.

The tin can captains and the woman they
shared? All dead.
The steel mill is a dusty old lady, anymore.
Yes, anymore.
The girl you loved married someone who is
never in love with anyone but himself.

Your old typewriter is rusting in the cellar
until you oil it down and set up writing on
the kitchen table.

Middle class used to be normal.
Now it is a pained threatening precipice of
tortuous cliffs jagged above every economic head.
Now everybody is either rich or in the welfare
line.

Folks used to make love by the river.
Now the river is dirty with deaths and public
sorrows.
People without money setup tents by the river
even when the Winter's ice shows fangs and
claws.

The graveyard is filled with classmates who had
such pretty young skin and hair when they died.
Such pretty young skin and hair.

When poets come home just to touch a dragonfly, they try to deconstruct excruciating change then
end up kissing what they can not correct as they sit by the Monongahela drinking harsh, burning regrets.