Sunday, October 4, 2015

NO CROSSFIRE BUT ONCE AGAIN CAUGHT PORCH SMOKING



NORMAL AFTER MIDNIGHT IN THE 48205

Sleeping with one blind eye open
never allows for dreams of any sort,
just as reality in waking hours
throws up the same sight obstacles
and allows for no dreams or hope of them.

Gunfire rolls in from Faircrest,
answered only with the shooter’s
heavy breathing as he removes the warm corpse
to the next yard over, it is after all hard
to throw dead weight over the fences everyone erected
when there was population in this place.
Yet where better
than an abandoned lot for a dead man?

Raining bullets and water
make for comfortable companions
one eliminates a problem
and
the other the problem’s blood.

I am not bothered anymore by close in gun fire.
No one flinches or dives for cover,
few here learn how to truly aim, (or have any).
It’s almost as if we have changed from a first communion
to a bullet wound as our rite of holy passage into adulthood.
Having another scar to point to makes everyone an adult,
giving those scars is the mystery; they come 
from any one of the many negative emotions.

A man here will die protecting his drugs or television
but not for his family, they are more easily replaced
costing only cooing words, pawn shop ring, and sperm.

Mercurial is a word that fits right here in this poem.
I don’t know why.
It is like the gunfire over on Faircrest
coming in my direction but not at me,
I know how to spell it
but I do not know what it means
(am I a carousel of rotating moods)
and whether it may one day apply 
to my blood on the ground
or
my cadaver being dumped over a fence
waiting the CSI Detroit program to do an episode.

© M Durfee
10.4.2015

8 comments:

  1. Those are wandering thoughts at midnight... I do believe you're a night creature like me?

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    Replies
    1. Decades Shadow--I have not slept well at night for 35 years--the night is far more interesting when you live in the middle of a slum circus, trying to not enjoy the show or become an act within it.

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    2. I'm in total agreement, nights are more interesting. And the imagination can go haywire, heee heee hee

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  2. How sad a life it is when a family is more easily replaced than our distractions and our protections. What is truly important? I guess it is different for each. CSI Detroit. Ha. Wonder who they will cast in that? The first one just went off the air this week.

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  3. I'm living smack in da middle between the bar and the hospital ... only 2 blocks walking either way ... the bar is where my (future) patients operate ... the hospital is where I operate ... we have one thing in common ... we work at night ... be careful, meowpapa ... I will too ... Love, cat.

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  4. Detroit, desperation, death and denial.

    You paint a picture, an impression, of defeat and despair Mark.

    Perhaps it is time for an asteroid to deal with this situation as it did with the dinosaurs?

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  5. Mark-I can only be grateful for sweet sleep. Even my occasional nightmares don't rival your reality. xo

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So Walking Man I was thinking...