Block

No parking Wednesdays at noon and the garbage lines the streets A cereal box with cartoons and a price tag way too steep And a fence that leans to the south around a yard with specks of grass And a dog with more teeth than mouth chained up sifting through trash That ice cream truck rolls too slow and the picture's black and white And the cabin up back still ain't cold and it's mostly out at night And there ain't no kids where it go and it don't play music right And a kid with a hoodie looks old under the traffic light That liquor store sells Patron but it just sits on the shelf And that Steel Reserve in the back practically sells itself And the Arab up at the front don't ever touch the stuff Single Swishers and blunts in a package opened up And a white tee XXXL make the men on the corners look tough

And the men on the corners have lines and the women walk by straight Bold black and red for sale signs posted up on the gates Of every other Victorian with wood over the windows And someone converses about Jordan's while wearing last year's Timbo's And a Chinese takeout menu decorates the gates with symbols And the cats are feral and fat and unreasonably nimble The trash is full to the top no cans or bottles in it Big bags being dragged down the street clanging and leaking liquid Expired tags on a Buick with one rim all in chrome And an older woman in stretch pants shuffles along too slow Pieces of flowers and a poem falling off a flickering light pole And a picture of someone it seems somebody used to know And a buzz in the air from a congregation of telephone wires

And on the wires are birds sitting tiny and black And tennis shoes from the 90's looking fine and intact And a cable awkwardly hanging never reaching a house And below it a stained up and soggy formerly leather couch And rainbow patterns of oil pooling in potholed cement And a screen door with no hinges hanging hopelessly bent And a Bentley dressing the cover of a car magazine And a Price Is Right crowd cheering on a television screen With a big bat jutting out and the color mostly green And a stove where one burner works and the oven should be cleaned And coupons clipped on the table waiting to be redeemed And a siren sings long and deep and the chopper's double meaned And the median is asleep so to wake and walk at strange things