Someone is new in the building,
I can smell the bacon.
It is a feather teasing my nose.
Will they have coffee and toast?
Is there strawberry jam?

I can remember eating bacon,
crisp, salty crunches of meat
that I can no longer afford.
Get old, my friend,
live on disability and bacon is
a mere memory.

Sometimes I pretend
I am a vegetarian,
but I have no proper teeth
that will grind things
to my need.

There is a desiccated cantaloupe
sitting like a ****** queen
on the counter by the door,
calling to me - waiting for my
sharpest spoon to scoop
its insides hollow.
I play games with time...
stretching out the moments,
for once it is gone...

Being poor is an honor.
It is a state of grace.
Littlest things become
treasures to our day.

At the market I sigh in awe
of one mold-ridden tomato,
bruised and ruined, but at
a price I can almost afford.

Hours rise up and pop
like fuzzy bubbles of
newly-poured cola.
One minute, life-defining,
the next - pretty air
that tickles the nose.

He made me sell my books.
I wanted words - he wanted dope.
All my lovely volumes were packed
in boxes one day when I
came home from work.

He never took me anyplace.
But he took me to Powell's
to sell my Shakespeare collection,
my John Donne, all the Emily Dickenson -
and my cherished Edgar Allan Poe...
all the musty, strange old books
I had lovingly hoarded -
many first editions.

Next he took me to a used book store
where my paperbacks could be traded
for stacks of westerns he would be
too high on crank to read.

Now my books live in the closet.
Safe...hidden, like Jews in a Warsaw Ghetto,
or runaway teenage girls in abandoned buildings.

It has been five years.
Perhaps soon I will get a bookcase
and let them out to stand beside my chair.

Crabbed old feet - imprisoned
in shoes too small, too *****
and too red.
A bit of music escapes
from some trendy café,
she dances in the wailing cold.
She remembers when
she was pretty.
She remembers being young.

Now a ***** wall
of fears drifts as she finds
her old age has begun.

She is worn down, worn out
by the pain every old woman knows.
The laughing mouth of the grave
waits to welcome her home.