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