Empty Bottle

[anirbas]

Shh. Listen. Outside
a train winds and wails
its way through town
in the night

Its old bones
clack-clack-clacking
creak-creak-creaking
across the rails

Over the bridge
what's left of the upper
middle class after 2007
wines and dines itself
to excess and beyond
four shiny new cars
in the drive way
swimming pool
in the back yard
an expensive great dane
settled by the hearth

(The hoity toity live
in the six figure homes
at the top of the hill
above the upper middle class
Man, you should see
the swag there!)


While down the road
in the lower class
neighbor hood
closer to the train
tracks a toddler
wends and wails
his little self down
a dark hallway his stomach
growling his bottle
empty emptier emptiest

Mom passed out on the couch
next to boyfriend of the moment
exhausted from riding the horse
not the quadrupedic sort
the kind that leaves
tracks on your arms
not in the dirt

Up the block
in the inky dark
seated against the back
wall of the old corrugated
metal cotton gin
in down town even closer
to the train tracks
a thin raggedy man
and an equally thin
raggedy dog share
a cheap forty ounce bottle
of beer between them
until it is empty

Who will help these
people, if not us?

Society brainwashed
by governmental propaganda
into believing it's the poor slobs
trying to take your money
(look the other way
pretend they're not there!)
It's not corporate America!
let's cut funding
to several
societal
programs
instead

Instead
of voting
to rein the big
boys in to finally
pay their due
after the past
forty years
of free
wheeling
ginning
spinning
lying










(I have absolutely no idea
where this poem is going...
I'm going to sleep. I'll look
at it again, tomorrow. )

[phantasm]

This makes me think of one of those nostalgic/resurrected train lines
with dining cars attached to them. They give people some idea what
it was like to travel in style when trains were the dominant transportation.
I've never been on one myself, but I've heard of them. We have a few in my hometown.

[anirbas]

I'm still puzzling over it. It started out feeling like a statement poem on New Age society when I first landed here with the beginnings of it in my head...LoL...Then the train I could hear in the near distance wove its way into it...I dunno. I'm still glaring at it. (I would like to go on a train like you described, too. AmTrak runs through here, too. But, that's not dining car elegance. I'd still like to take a trip across country on AmTrak. Either to San Diego or San Francisco; New York; even parts of Penn state to show David some of the old covered bridges I saw when I visited New Castle, twenty-thousand years ago. haha )

[phantasm]

Well, it evoked something different to me. I was not thinking AmTrak, at all.
We have oldie trains around here that we resurrected and then refurbished
for tourists and whatnot in attempt to get the economy going.




What it all comes down to is people wanting to feel superior to other people,
and well, that's easy when you think someone in the down-and-out did it to themselves somehow.

[anirbas]

What I meant when referring to Amtrak is that's the closest thing we have here, to what you're talking about with the refurbished old trains. Most of the trains that run through this town are are regular trains. That's what I was hearing when I started the piece. LoL That's what the poem is supposed to be about...How easily folks can be duped into thinking these things about other people. And my opinion, the gov't has gotten very good at wagging the dog the past forty years...Forty years ago, they told people to vote to give these corporations all these loopholes and taxbreaks, because, it was trickle down economics. If they made the rich richer, they'd get some too...Fartytales, that's all.......

[phantasm]

Makes you wonder what the military is fighting for......



BTW, happy 4th of July!

[anirbas]

Happy Fourth of July to you to, Phant!!! As for the military, I do believe if we'd sat idle and done nothing in the aftermath of Nine Eleven, would have been the wrong thing to do. However, I feel it's time to bring our people home. It's been fourteen years of war, now. I think we've more than proven, if you kick us in the nuts, yes, we fall down. But, then we get back up and kick you right back in the nuts. Nostradamus predicted a war between us and a "prince of the east" that would last approximately twenty five years...So, my question is this? Did this time frame start with the first time we went over and rousted Quadaffi (mssplld) or later...Tired mind wandering about tiresome things.

[phantasm]

Well, Christians have been debating the meaning of their/our Scripture for millennia.
We/they can't seem to agree on what it all means. And that's only the "New Testament." As for
the "Old Testament," we/they can claim all we/they want that the events of Jesus' life was
foretold in it, but we could debate the merits of that with Jews of all stripes 'til we're blue
in the face. And THAT is merely within the religion I grew up with.

Did Nostradamus predict the coming of the wars in the Middle East? I'll be damned if I know.
Depends on when they were supposed to start.... Was it on the attack of the Twin Towers and and the Pentagon?
Let's not forget about the Pentagon, after all. Or was another event a triggering event, like Iraq War I
circa 1990? That would mean the war arc should be over soon, if it's not already. Or, like most stories
in the world of fiction, are there multiple beginnings and multiple endings to the supposed foretold events?

Weather supposedly fulfilled prophesy or prophecy yet to be fulfilled, I tend to be intensely skeptical of it all.
The religion I was born into is no exception. Don't get me wrong, I love the future. I love thinking about it and musing
about it. I'm trying to build a life based on writing SF, after all. No matter what I might want to believe, I need good
enough reasons to believe. Rarely do prophecies of any kind come even close to giving me that...

Anyhooo.

I predict the United States will live long enough to see its' 240th anniversary. 364 days to go.........................

[anirbas]

Laughing at and loving your prediction!!!!