POPULATION

The scavenged sheets 
that act as curtains 
are always drawn,
except over the windows 
he doesn’t bother with anymore;
the ones covered in 
plywood and duct tape.

The house sits on the corner
of gravel nothing and 
Victorian Era decadence,
some of the old-timers 
think they can remember back
when the house was
part of that pomp.
The grandeur is decades gone;
he hardly ever bothers with
pants these days.

No one knows 
what he does in there,
but most guess it’s
only enough to keep living 
another day.
The June sun beats nuclear on the
treeless, grassless patch of gravel and dirt.

It’ll be months before 
they know he’s gone,
and even then,
all it’ll mean is another building
for the city to condemn,
and someone dropping the number
of the population total 
on the sign at the edge of town.

James Benger has written a bunch of stuff. Some of it has even been published in print and on the interwebs. So far there are two ebooks, three chapbooks, six splits, and two full-lengths. He is the resident slacker on the Board of Directors of the Writers Place, and is the most truant member of the Riverfront Readings Committee. He is also the admin of an online poetry workshop called 365 Poems in 365 Days, which has produced four anthologies and counting. He lives and Kansas City with his wife and children.