"406 West Main," A Weird Catastrophe Poem
Dedicated to those lovely denizens in Medford, Oregon.
406 West Main I’m living in this house with eight other
college kids, 5 women,
and the landlady is a Russian woman named Svetlana.
my next door neighbor, Maggie,
knocked on my
door and asked me to stop playing guitar and singing
because it was too loud.
I just left a place where there were crazed junkies on my floor
and they scratched deep lines into their front door
and the whole place smelled like tobacco and body sweat
and bugs and the carpet was stained up and down and
the elevator had its numbers burnt off
and the kids all had silver teeth
and the parents all swore and gave obscene gestures
and my birthday present was stolen from
my front door and
I knew who did it but I couldn’t do anything to him
and legless men in wheelchairs
tried to hit on my girlfriend, asking her to
come to their room,
and old women with no teeth in their head told me how
nice I was and how beautiful my wife was and they
asked if we could drive them to the gas station to buy
cigarettes
and the woman with the gimp leg and the lazy eye fell
into the snow helping us push our car out of it and an
old sunburnt woman always hook over her walker,
convulsed her head and arms and hands while she tried
to take unsteady puffs from her cigarette and her
quivering tongue was white and dry and foul smelling
and the only words she ever said are “hank you” when
someone held a door open for her
and cats wandered the halls and the
sounds of the stairwell echoed throughout the building
and fire alarms were pulled
in the middle of the night and there was no air
conditioning so we slept naked without the covers
and sweat all night long through the hot summer months
and a balding latino man walked out from the
elevator wearing nothing but boxers that were hanging
below his ass cheeks to sleepily let his friend in through
the back door
and someone pissed in the washers and the dryers
and management posted passive aggressive notes all over the place and
blind women shook uncontrollably and
policemen visited our floor, pounded on the door,
and a guy with unblinking eyes and a dark face who was
never quite all there asked me every time he saw me if I
was new to the place and women screamed at three in the morning and
woke us up and
the cockroaches were plentiful and intelligent and persistent and they shed,
millions of them emanating from an undulating brown mass nested in the
dark bowels of the building’s communal garbage chute
but,
at least I could play my guitar as loud as I wanted and
no one complained.
in fact,
the denizens all said that they
loved it and that I should do it more.
now I live with college students
who tell me to be quiet.
I miss those old freaks.