Irvington

Ribbons orange from days in the sun
once were off white and they hung there
from the lamp posts like some old eyes
in the old face of an old man.
The small stretch of long street
looked frozen in October of at least fifty
years ago or maybe even more.
I poured my vodka on the hay bales
at the corner and lit up my entire
book of matches but decided
it was best to just keep walking.
There were leather coats of every shade
of brown in one big window down the stretch
where inside two men mounted
sheep heads on the pink wall
only seeing me as I was seeing them.
I left my cigarettes on the ledge beside
the glass and kept on moving through
the plastic ghosts and pumpkins nailed
to every wooden door.
The final building on the block was some old
church refurbished into an auto shop
owned by repairmen who retrofitted the old crucifix into a scarecrow for their small garden
which was dying in the early Autumn cold.
The eyes were crescent shaped
with fear and still those dark birds circled praying to the avian equivalent of Him
that they could somehow taste
the petals of those flowers
which were falling just as certainly as me.