A Day in the Crescent

Something I wrote a long time ago & a song

I’ve written a poem a day since NaPoWriMo began on April 1. I’m taking it one day at a time without committing to the entire month because who knows what might happen the next day or even the next minute.

I’m sharing this poem I wrote in 2012 that was published in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature along with two others. Nothing much has changed since then except now I mostly stream music instead of listening to the Boze radio and I read the newspaper online. And yet, so much has changed in the big wide world. And ain’t that just the way of things.

A Day in the Crescent

It’s another balmy day in paradise.
I push down the plunger in the French
Press, inhaling the earthy aroma of
the blackest of coffees called Community.
The morning paper lies on the coffee table
waiting for its unfolding, opening and
adjusting shake. “Sneaking Sally Through
The Alley” is dancing out of the Boze, WWOZ
accommodating its listeners with the
best music in the country, bar none.

Noise from the street wafts through the
open French doors: the rummmm-rummmm
of the city bus, the high-pitched laughter
of kids on spring break, the artificially
cheerful greeting of “order when you’re ready!”
coming from McD’s drive-through so often
that it’s become just another sound like
the bus or the cat’s meow.

The newspaper serves up last night’s murder
du jour as well as the professionally whitened smiles
of the uppercrust partiers of the Social Scene –
Not on the same page, of course.

I get up from the couch, look out the front window
and marvel how the bad and the good
co-exist in the same city on the same
day and how complacent we all are that
it is so.