Like a Man Gone Mad: Poems in a New Century

Signs of Life in a Sundown City

100 Signs of Life in a Sundown City We number less than half of what we were four decades back. The young look elsewhere for their lives. The old grow older and die. Mansions of a long dead gentry calcify like skulls. Museums lease from millionaires what artists painted while they starved. On streets that once were prime, the smell of oligarchy gone bourgeois is palpable. The current synonym for blackjack, poker, craps and slots is gaming. Uptown at midnight the currency is drugs and guns, and murderers grow younger by the day. Regardless, the trees parade in place at permanent attention. Simply by happening, each day proclaims itself unique and unrepeatable. And two undaunted rivers fork and fuse into a third that flows into a fourth that steers in silence to the sea that’s stayed the same since Genesis. ...