PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

~Rat City~

The streets are the theme
of this morning's mural of fog.

Torn dollar-a-hope scratch tickets
litter a Seattle bus stop
where day laborers,
part-time sailors and I
sit on toppled shopping carts.
We wait among pigeons who binge on crumbs.
Street folk are hungry, but not enough
to seize the free feathered lunches.

A sixteen-year-old school girl
wears a rouge mask and walks past
my much obliged middle-aged eyes
while soaked gray air melts her mascara.
Blue trickles thick

down  taboo images
while the sun peeps through
the broken pane of a cloud
as big band music blasts
from a passing Camaro.
It was the groove

that spiked the punch of music
long before grunge wrenched 
from a local's dope-sick gut 
hardened the emerald scene.

D. B. Tompsett