hobo

There was once a day

when Lady Luck

had crossed over

the other side of the tracks.

She wove her way among

the makeshift tents

and bearded beaten men,

picked her way through

bits of broken bottles and

rusted cans.

She rode the trains then,

an old cigarette dangling from her lips that were smeared

with the desperate remains of her dark lipstick.

She rubbed her thinning lips together,

trying in vain to remember the taste of bootleg champange and

the honeyed kiss of men.

She stared at the wide-eyed children that clung to their

mother's skirts in bread lines while she blew her cigarette smoke in

slow, quiet contemplation.

She examined every hobo's sign

with a cool eye, mouthing each syllable softly to herself.

She squatted on curbs and stair steps, crooning to stray dogs

songs of the Roaring, Golden Era in a husky voice.

She went where she wanted in those days,

a wandering soul among wandering souls.

And her hair, once a short flapper bob, grew long and wild.

She was seen in the campfire smoke

of vagrants and migrants.

And they whispered

to each other in flickering light,

"Lady Luck walks about,

now a nomad like us all.

Catch her if you can.

She's the one who'll save us all."

This poem is based on aspects of the Great Economic Depression in the 1930's which directly followed an era of great wealth and propsperity, the Roaring Twenties.