I
the town was stink
stinker than the sugar-
shit saturated Cipero
in crop-time
ever noticed how each town
has its own unique stench
maybe it’s the drains and sewers
II
the stagnant fish funk of the waterfront
had long been cleaned up
filthy funny-coloured ghetto drains
with floating plastic
now halfway clean
flowed lazy into the city
swamp-sulphur fumes and
black smoke from urban landfill
lined with rows of corbeaus
no longer billowed foul welcome
to Sewer City
the horrible salt fish factory fumes
no longer hung and clung like a cloak
choking the lungs and life out of the city
but the town still stank
III
it was still illegal to loiter or litter
but it was legal to live
on the streets of the city
to squat to lounge
to sleep to wake
to piss to defecate
on the city pavements
under the high rise buildings
and skyscrapers
any time of day or night
one has rights you know
like the right to thumb one’s nose
or any other dirty body
part at the right to human dignity
IV
a vagrant awoke
rubbed his rheumy eyes
calmly stepped out from the bedroom
of his cardboard condominium
spat and proudly exposed
his manhood
to the indifferent midday crowd
V
damn those rats are fat
almost as fat as the real rats
they live well on the leftovers
from garbage bins
and garbage heaps
rummaged by vagrants
and stray dogs
VI
the mayor
called in the pied piper
that was a failure
maybe the pied piper
was a cocaine piper
blowing on a brandy bottle
or zoosh pipe
instead of a flute pipe
maybe the mayor or the piper
was unsure whether
it was the rats the dogs
the corbeaus or the vagrants
to be removed
so all remained
after all who or what would
follow a fruity-toot flute
when there was so much pirate music
piping in the city streets all day and all night
VII
gradually a strange thing happened
one could no longer differentiate between
the rats
the corbeaus
the stray dogs
the vagrants and
the human beings
Copyright ©2009 by G. Newton V. Chance
- G. NEWTON V. CHANCE
- George Newton Vivian Chance (Trinidad and Tobago) -- member of the Poet Society of Trinidad and Tobago, http://poetssocietytt.blogspot.com/ and the World Poets Society, http://world-poets.blogspot.com/ -- born in Tobago on 3rd March 1957. While residing at Rio Claro was inspired to write over a hundred poems at the turn of the Millennium. Hobbies include playing wind instruments, building computers, observing nature, reading and writing poetry. Believes that the power of a song is in its ability to evoke emotions by the marriage of lyric and music but that music without lyric can be just as powerful, that lyric without music can also be just as powerful, that there is music in the lyric and that lyric can be simple yet profound. Also, in this the age of computers, would like to model his lines after simple and efficient code and, analogous to Object Oriented Programming, achieve most of his imagery from nouns and verbs, avoiding the bloat and excess of unnecessary adjectives. This is what he aspires to attain in his poetry.
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