Open To Interpretation
Tic Tac Toe
Are you up against
The sidewalk, the curb,
The street?
Do your homes' front steps
Drop you down
Like from a cement wharf
Into a busy watery bay,
That constant swirling noise
Night and day?
Those metal doors close,
The glass windows roll up,
The keys turn
And the engines rumble
Forward our submarines
Propelling by those
Odd fish with legs walking.
The tic tac toe
Is tied in stasis:
Row on row
Floor on floor
Neighbor above
Neighbor below
Neighbor beside
We don't know
How to play outside.
You have bare dirt
All around your walls
And you never plant flowers.
The bees know
One from another's.
DolphinWords
Notes: the mid-Atlantic states had an earthquake!...4.2...hardly worth the mention, but on the East coast such are unusual...I continue to google search the B'mor tale (see previous posts)...sometimes the Baltimore Sun's paywall delays long enough for the reading...it goes on apace...today, how an illegal arrest that resulted in a car chase fatality happened...this in 2010...drugs planted in the suspects car...suspect served time for the fatality, but released for false drug charge...in Los Angeles, a police captain is pleading innocent to owning an industrial neighborhood warehouse being used to grow drugs...maybe he didn't know...ink and poem Tic Tac Toe reference the Baltimore Row Houses...searching those, I happen on the stories of tenants' troubles with the managers of low income housing apartments...these units are bought up by investors, and the new owners take on the out standing debts of tenants who had payment troubles with old owners...they are ruthlessly pursuing the debts, and any new current debts as well...and these managers are being taken to task...for their tactics, and too for not maintaining their properties...one of the Presidents relatives owned one of these management companies...since divested, but still has stock...somewhat murkey the whole thing...but a lot of management companies are finding using the courts to collect debts, even to the point of arrests. to their liking...I don't know who 'owns' the old row houses...but the city has plans to level them with eminent domain and re develop...one can pick one up for less than 20,000 dollars, but these are fixer uppers...otherwise, home prices in Baltimore look to be the same as all over the country, which is remarkably similar...and high...modern high density housing is doomed to decay over decades...from roofs to sewer lines, the materials wont last long...the row houses were made of brick...clear everything out from the interior to the brick walls, and one has like a new structure to begin again with...trouble with brick walls, they don't give in an earthquake, though there must be some way around this, as I see modern ones in So Cal...
:)
DavidDavid
