Cute boys and girls
used to being seen
form into a tornado
and blow down the hill
past my house,
twisting heads
behind them, glass
falling out of frames beside them,
and the stoops and porches
ahead of them
fill with the eager populace
who hope what’s coming
will strangle and demolish
their boredom.  Everyone’s drunk
and this city is beginning to spin
around the cute squad, thinking
that cute’s the answer to the grit,
opening bars for the cute,
cleaning up streets ahead of the cute,
renaming old squares for the cute
until no one remembers that this city
was never built for cute, that cute has always
been swallowed and transformed
or spit out and sent back to where cute
comes from, and what we have left
once it’s gone is storm drains
full of glitter and rubble
we squabble over, trying to decide
how to make it cute until it bores us
and we go back to the porches, repair our windows
and flex our rueful necks back into their normal
ramrod straightness, their focused glare
at the simple ugly nature we were born from
and which has kept us pure and stony
all these years, proof against the transitory
and the shiny, brave as dull-armored soldiers
in the mud and the winter rain.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations, worcester