Dark, dirty streets live in my mind
broken brick alleyways,
the color of blood in the midnight.
Streetlamps from another era
fasten me here for a short while.
The warm stickiness of old city grime,
it’s endless, never removed.
And I wonder,
Is this how it’s done?
Where the last step of a Jazz duo lay,
where the putrid decay of the dirty city lives?
Where words are scrawled across the walls in warm blood,
Is this where you find the poem?

Or just the poet,
looking?

Eeks, one of my first published poems; it appeared in Directions magazine about twenty years ago.