at first, brother and i lived in the rural countryside locks on doors were not bolted no crime to speak of but father's earnings went south the days of housing and stocks tanking dad sold the wooded house moved to a tacky apartment twenty miles from the farmlands into the inner city of gang fights every weekend on friday night football knives chains and rumbles brother and i were now in a school of bomb scares weekly i saw how the environment shifted the vision we toughened up on a night heard a loud kaboom from the first floor (we lived on the second) the apartment like a shotgun police kept us indoors for a full day a man on the first floor in his boxers looking at tv head plastered on wall through the front bay window with a sawed-off by a shadowed mafia hit man we kids saw the carnage cleanup crews scraping off the splattered wallpaper carpets thrown into the dumpster in the back the next day we kids unrolled the carpets and looked at the skull fragments with bits of rotting brain with teardrops we missed the country fields with horses and cattle forests and trees farmlands of growing things just fifteen miles to the east 4.5 10/10 © Brian Peter Hodgkinson
the shift
11
May