Richard Schnap- A Poem

WASTELAND

It was as wretched as an old homeless man
With parched lips, bloodshot eyes, half his teeth,

A neighborhood filled with abandoned schools,
Garbage-strewn lots, boarded-up stores,

But it was there that I had my first phone job
Where I was fired one day and rehired the next

And lived in an apartment with my first wife
In a marriage that collapsed like a burning building

It was as cursed a place as a giant web
Where a bloodthirsty spider caught helpless flies

And I sometimes wonder whose fate it is now
To find their way home there alone in the dark