Something Else

[Ca ne fait rien]

Adrian came.
-turn on the news[b]Do you need this intro? As reader I do not have a connection to Adrian, so it loses me straight away.
he says
a grocery store burns in our living room.
firefighters pour onto the corner with this strophe as intro it may help draw the casual reader in straight away, especially wth that enjambment and 'locust' which I don't get, but somehow doesn't matter to engaging this reader.
of Locust and Twenty
years ago.

missing jump-ropes,
the Rottweiler’s that used to give chase,
the neighbors who moved after coming home[b]yes, yes, yes you got me hooked now, because I relate to this, so most people probably do too, if not literally ,at least in a nostalgic retro way. Also I find it metaphoric and layered
to an emptied house one night,

they step over
brown bottles covering sewer grates
to reach the hydrant.

he says- I hit a baseball
right through that window. these strophes devolp that idea s above

a woman is pointing to the left from her doorway- arresting...like the stand alone of it

and there -I say-
your brother lost his tooth on the curb. ouch.

the store reappears as the eye
follows vines of smoke
climbing the sky.

-well, I guess we have
something else to forget now

I say nothing,
fallen into a flash of a counter
with a register, a bag of penny candy
dropped into my hand.

seeing a suit behind a desk,
the television falls asleep again, Good- this, the way t brings us back to the impersonal.
a curtain pulled like a plug.

somehow, we both know
this is how it starts,
the carving of our block into
just another street in a forest,
until, slowly,
we are left with
a name without a face

and I have to admit we have
something else to forget now.

Hi-I like what you did here [/b] although this could probably be tightened up a bit here and there, it got to me because there have been a few fires in the shops along the street where I lived for 25 years, and seeing them on the news is exactly as you show here... the changes in the street translated into the changes in the person, making a subtle metaphor.