Thread: Hatcher Street

When I was living in Dallas I did a series of poems called "The streets of Dallas." The following is one:









Hatcher Street



Old black men sit in empty chairs

Deep brown eyes watching

Johnsongrass

Bleeding from sidewalk wounds

And used car lots sprouting like

Broken promises,

Littered

With shattered glass and faded memories.

Behind boarded windows

In crack house rooms

Death breaths in

Through toothless grins

While streetwise youth

Play deadly games

Near lonely graveyards

Full of brown eyes

That no longer see

The dust that blows

Down Hatcher Street.

Very interesting, but I would delete sit from the first line & decapitalise as it implies breaks that aren't there...

The fact that they are empty chairs makes 'sit' active rather than passive, once they have sat the chairs are no longer empty, they can't be in them, present continuous, if they are empty. I think he is right, but wonder if it might be a little more obvious if he used a word such as 'occupy'.

PS I don't usually care for un-punctuated work, it usually simply looks lazy, but this mostly works very well.

Nah! Occupy is too technical a word, has no poetic flow. Old black men in empty chairs sounds worthy of investigation, occupy might mislead to thoughts of sit-in or work-to-rule - Perhaps sit on empty chairs.


Why am I writing here, it's less than 10 minutes to my birthday...

I enjoyed this one, like very much the feel of it. I did feel that the Caps distracted me somewhat, but that may only be a personal preference. I agree with Bloggsworth about eliminating 'sit' from the first line.