Sitting alone

Sitting alone

In a small room

With a dog

Curled up at the foot of the bed.

He wandered in from somewhere

Across the hall

To claim a spot in front of the window

Where the sun punched through

The dirt on a pane,

Cracked by a stone

Kicked up by a kid skipping school.

We watched the rats play

In the alley

There was a game going on.

Some of the old guys

Put down hard cash

To see which rat would be first

To chew their way out of an old shoe box.

It wasn’t a big-money game

This part of town

Stopped being a big-money area

Fifty years ago.

When the bottom fell out of the river

Shipbuilding moved to China

And the carpetbaggers

Moved in to claim

All the best real estate.

The dog had the best

Of what was left.

He gave me a look

As if to say, “You still here?”

I guess I was

But I wasn’t sure for how long.

The sky looked full of sadness

The world was a blood-soaked mess,

I was rotting from the inside out

Which was irreversible

And once upon a time

There was a future

We had yet to lose.