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SONG FOR ASBURY
this shore is a poem lost at sea
waves slide on a crooked beach
words on its burnt out billboards
don’t change
Hoboken can keep its leftovers
Washington Street’s
photocopied candle shops
and coffee houses
I
ain’t gonna give up
these pale green walls
rusted amusement park fences
and wilted boardwalk arches
I
am not afraid
to find myself on streets
one way signs
unhinged
I swagger
with this city’s soul
in my pocket
if
Asbury bleeds
scabs over tomorrow
I will move notes
with this dusty gold guitar
wake its valley of dead songs
unshackle this landscape
of beer bottles and bolts
SOMEONE BUSTED THE PADLOCK
someone busted the padlock
and I don’t want to leave
these uneven floors
a shattered house
of mirrors
hangs in time
without doing much
the
scent of moss
on moist iron
decades of mud
caked on my shoes
and a skee ball machine
stuck on 90
frosted glass and vines
twist over lost virginity
in empty mezzanines
buckled stairs rise to plywood windows
above a sea
I know what it’s like
to be a color trapped
in a funhouse cage
the
rain drizzles through
my roofless head
I hear the last waltz
the southern blue fades
on orange brick
and I won’t leave
this time tunnel
these rusted electric wires
run in my veins
this is a scroll
my life as black graffiti ink
on a stone wall
BARROOM WINNERS AND BOARDWALK KINGS
Jimmy’s high school photo
crumpled on train tracks
blood dries
in a needled alley
this is as close as he gets
to leaving behind dunes and driftwood
he
sits with a used guitar
searches for music he lost
everything here
is made safe for losers
this is not the town
his father promised
the chrome crank
of a Linden auto plant
a shifting shaft
in a Bedford steel mill
painted wood porch swing
and green metal fence
silent shut down
Jimmy is left
with records in a cardboard box
like Springsteen stranded
on a dusty beach road
words drip
from a cold greasy engine
electric stories of barroom winners
and boardwalk kings
scotch-taped to metal window frames
hang like untouchable gems
on a plywood throne
Trina Scordo is a south Jersey poet and curator who
has recently taken on the much-blessed and utterly
thankless task of managing the NJ Online Poetry
Calendar. Her work has appeared in Long Shot and is
forthcoming in several other bleeding edge litzines. |