ILLADELPH
by Even Jundhausen
I saw on South Street in Illadelphia
“Art is the Center of the World,”
pieces of mirror glass, cascading over pedestrians
college kids tripping over beer bottles boggling
their fingers along the edges
staining their clothes with spray painted from thoughts in tune to
Technic turntables
used bookstores and Infernos blaring their store shop stereos
to grub attention from adolescent anarchists,
amateurs to the white bread world built by brothers of blue collared stoics
I saw all this
with a view interrupted by change collectors
walking concrete block to concrete block to the ticking tock
thriving on their forced friendliness
man speaking to men, they are Wordworth in disguise
selling their prose in exchange
for your novelty for their sustaining cup of shelter stew
The masses walk by like blades
of grass, waltzing in front of
minstrel flunkies, imagining
countryside instead of smell stench streets
and locked away apartments
where intellectuals increase the modality of their meandering months
I saw all this in Illadelph
as a passerby picked out as
a foreigner; the ill initiated
brotherly love dripping
logic in hard swallowed gulpings
Evan Hundhausen graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University in 2001. He is a an award-winning writer and has had poetry published in The Asheville Poetry Review. You can download his newest short story “Elnora and the Man” to your Kindle device at Amazon.com.
Send poetry submissions of 250 words or fewer to poetry@boulderweekly.com.
