Street Life

there’s not a whole lot of light
crawling out of the barrel
in the morning, rusted, cold steel
painted metal, upright man hole
made whole by the dark dreams
of Cancer and failed promise
the sun will rise, will warm
raised faces, will dry hope
to dust, particles here and there
seeding wet furrows, wild things
at play throwing bones, we are
the things we are, all changes
on the back lot, all life
two dimensional as the feature
film projected on the white
wailing wall of …. wonder
filtered through fiber optics
digitally run in zeroes and ones
while we sit in darkness, again,
waiting for the sun to rise
to crawl out of the barrel,
bitter about not being better
than we should have been
when today was tomorrow, but
resolved to be OK with that
rather than self-destruct, the
lovely, lonely alternative playing out
on squalid streets where squatters
risk becoming landscape colors
painted with an unseen brush
by an invisible artist whose vision
of the future does not include them.