A number of years ago when I was learning to drive
My dad would make me drive down to Ionia Michigan
because it could **** a full hour of driving practice
And because it was some other place to go.

Just recently I had to go back there and pay off a speeding ticket.
There are worse things than paying off a speeding ticket.

This town has gotten tired.
I walk by the city hall and eye the crumbling brick beside the road
and I think they must not be trying very hard to attract any visitors here.
But there I was-
suddenly insulted.

The city lights have gone out decades ago but they never died. They left their posts- abandoned. Now all that remains are the the dim and flickering street lamps that stand on sidewalks and bide their time watching or waiting for the final walls to crumble.

The city has a sleepy aura that one would feel seeing somebody's 70's childhood toy, like a jack in the box or a colorful plastic record player left outside. A lost innocence, and the smell of marijuana seeping from every upstairs window downtown or of a girl once beautiful who now waits alone and used to take off her clothes and reveal her tongue and love the universe as it appeared to love her.

I walk inside another second hand store and see nobody attending the counter. Stiff- funereal clothes and grey dresses. There is one rack of men's clothing, I accidentally take a whiff of the stale dusty air and it suddenly holds me from touching them. I quietly stare at my sobering realization that I am in the cities ashtray. They sell here what they can't burn but probably should, and every ten shirts in a row indicates one more rock in a row at one of the many churches of necessity and I decide to get out.
This place gives me the creeps.