Striding down a Chicago sidewalk,
under the El,
I came across a croaked rat,
splayed out on its back
with a surprised expression,
amid rocky chunks of construction debris
apparently dropped from the skyscraped heavens.

Had it been scurrying about,
the vermin would have startled, menaced,
repulsed on a visceral level.
But in the stillness and repose of death,
the taxidermied-looking rat
came across as sympathetic,
an unwitting victim of a random fate.
It could have been any of us.

Its eyes bulged, its limbs seized.
I almost stopped and snapped a picture,
tweeted the tragedy out,
before thinking better of it.
People instinctually reject rats, like clowns.
I thought about scooping the piteous corpse up
with an alt weekly, tossing it into a dumpster,
giving it a little dignity. But I was in a hurry
and it was just a rat, after all.

Pounding the pavement with purpose,
I did a sign of the cross,
and prayed a little valediction.

The scrawny, slump-shouldered kid in the sweatshirt
grabbed as many Double AA batteries as he could hug
into the waiting ***** of his faded, ratty hoodie
from the display rack at the pharmacy down the block.

He made a run for it, slipping out the sliding doors,
into the starless night splashed across that inky empyrean.
It wasn’t necessary at all, he got out of there scot-free.
No one noticed any pilfering until they did the nightly inventory.

But his world was small, and he went back the next day for a juice.
The manager who was being interviewed perfunctorily by a cop
recognized him from his review of the security footage.
The kid got caught unawares, was arrested on the spot.

When he bonded out, he had to repay his brother the surety
so he headed to the other corporate pharmacy across the street
and grabbed armfuls of cartons of cigarettes he knew he could sell
on the corner, for he had no other means of repayment.

He had no job, no car, no degree, no nothing, nada, nada, nada.
His blinkered world was circumscribed, limited,  hemmed in,
circled by how far he could walk, trudge in a blizzard.
He made it out the whooshing door, again faced flashing lights.

In that moment, as the booked him back in county lockup
behind the thick slab of plexiglass, the guard smirked,
“haven’t I seen you here before, just like a day ago?”
He then knew it was all hopeless, oh so hopeless, an endless cycle.

You’re at a journalism conference
a few years back,
a welcome bit of professional development
that's become increasingly rare
in a time of budgetary leanness,
a rote exercise
whose attendance was padded
by college students, deep discounts
and last-minute appeals.

A speaker said,
look to your left and to your right.
The number of working reporters
has shrunk by a third over the last decade.
Only two-thirds of you are left.

After the last round of layoffs,
another slash of the scalpel
that seems unsustainable,
that seems to bleed off too much,
you notice all the empty desks,
all the absent computers,
how sparse the parking lot looks.

Holy hell,
this show is insane,
riveting, complexed, nuanced,
compelling, captivating, addictive,
he proclaimed
on Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook,
wondering where the days went,
wondering what unforeseen abyss swallowed him whole.

Makeup-clad teenagers spring out of the shadows
to startle the unsuspecting
who are in fact suspecting,
even anticipating but just playing along.

These paint-by-numbers haunted houses
that spring up in abandoned buildings
rely on the cheap startle of jump scares
even more than low-budget horror films.

So much so that a chainsaw-wielding kid
in a goalie mask will try to chase you down
as you walk out to the parking lot,
adrenaline fading but nerves still jangling.

We all know what's coming
in these seasonal pop-ups
even though it's supposed to be a shock.
But that’s why we go; that’s why we go.

Indianapolis bleats and blares and protests too much
that the Hoosier state is an idyllic business paradise
with low taxes, low costs, low unemployment, low everything.

Indiana’s the Walmart of… wait, don’t fret about those woefully low wages,
the Indiana Chamber of Commerce reassures struggling, undernourished souls.
The low cost of living means that scant pittance isn’t really as bad as it seems.

Yet, all the blather and palaver and ideological would-you-rather
somehow fails to stem the ongoing, bleeding, gushing
exodus of the college educated out of state to scattered scintillating cities.

Propaganda engines like the Indiana Economic Development Corporation
trumpet all these purported jobs at some factory or warehouse or call center,
yet years later, a TV reporter stands in an empty field that never got developed.

The Congressman said fluoride in the tap water would effectuate Sharia law.
The Congressman said immigrants would hire water sommeliers.
The Congressman said immigrants open froyo shops on every corner.
The Congressman said immigrants suckled like a dewy, famished baby.
The Congressman said terrorists suckled on the **** of welfare and secretly ran things.
The Congressman said Season 2 of The Wire was the best one, beyond question.
The Congressman said net neutrality would stifle board game night, blot out the imagination.
The Congressman said that true patriots were never neutral.
The Congressman said that drag queens were using the library, checking out books.
The Congressman said Taco Tuesday was fake news, a grand globalist conspiracy.
The Congressman said big government was coming for your houseplants and moist towelettes.
The Congressman said big government was the enemy.
The Congressman said terrorists were the enemy.
The Congressman said immigrants were the enemy.
The Congressman said the other was the enemy.
The Congressman said anyone who would order $7 avocado toast was the enemy.
The Congressman said anyone who read newspapers was the enemy.
The Congressman said that anyone who fact-checked a politician’s statements was the enemy.
The Congressman said enemies would burn the Constitution in a pile of seized towelettes.
The Congressman’s challenger said she got death threats and promptly dropped out.
The Congressman said she was lying, there were no threats.
The Congressman said she was really a liar all along.
The Congressman said he had tried to warn everyone.