Wrong turn
whole of diamond 12 flooded
looks like old shore
town of all shore towns
in the gray afternoon
NC two lane road
houses on stilts and dunes crawl to
west side of the tracks
where the brown runoff is
up to the doors and mats
and hellos
vacationers hustle
out of rain in board shorts
and bikinis, watch helpless
as helpless trashcans float
away and pass the cars
going 5 miles an hour south
or north splashing in huge white
waves the cars on the other
side, a great froth-war nobody
acknowledges like they would
a few yards away on bay pontoon
boats and crab fishing adventures
and I couldn’t get my
window up in time
before the next wave, I just wanted to
smell that ocean air and instead
got a mouth full’a Old Abemarle
Highway salt
For you
I saw your city
sink into the muck
of our collective
past,
a monument
to failure,
a laughing joker-sun
brilliantly coal red
in the summer
dying fire–
I marked it down
in my journal
of revelations
to scrawl on the
wall of bone dry hells
of our sometime
future,
I sang a song
that was a lie
so beautiful
as it disappeared
into the horizon
centrifuge,
just so you can claim it
as yours,
I’m giving it away—
There was this
old Bodhisattva of the
campground NC night
in Joe Rafsky head lamp
and old torn southern
baseball cap, savior of dying
fires or young blue flames,
young sapling stake of wood
in hand, wrapped in some
indiscernible newspaper of
Buxton, Ocracoke (like the
vegetable and the soda, ya)
Frisco, and bang the fires
going as the thunder creeps
nearer and then he’s gone into
the past or the wandering, looked for
him for 2 days and he wasn’t
nowhere in that place, patron
saint of the mosquito infested
air,
we finished the last piece of
meat as the rain hit harder,
the hiss stronger on the cooling
grill, the steam thicker, coals, gray and sad,
fire, embers and out, we
ran for cover through
puddles that had just found their way
at our feet and closed car doors tight,
out of breath and soaking,
the lightening caught up
and flashed southwest across
the starless skysea
Tom Pescatore grew up outside Philadelphia, he is an active member of the growing underground poetry scene within the city and hopes to spread the word on Philadelphia’s new poets. He maintains a poetry blog: amagicalmistake.blogspot.com. His work has been published in literary magazines both nationally and internationally but he’d rather have them carved on the Walt Whitman bridge or on the sidewalks of Philadelphia’s old Skid Row.