“Urban Intelligencer”

 

c. 2025 Rod Ice

All rights reserved

(7-25)

 

Cigarettes traded, first

Then bombshell bits and butcher knives

The urban intelligencer said

“How am I gonna stay alive?”

He carried a baseball bat

Across the spare tire in his car trunk

He figured breaking glass and bones

Would show he was done being a chump

The first swing made him a star

Nobody ever tried to push him so far

 

He came out of Cleveland

Right down by the lakeshore

Grew up getting robbed at daylight

Until his calluses couldn’t feel sore

He was numb and stooped

Lived in that vehicle, or a camping tent

His wild eyes were hot and bright

He sat drinking rotgut, at 99 cents

After years of that mental abuse

He was less human, and more fermented juice

 

He needed a change, quick

From this solemn, sad, state of affairs

Went out to a rural encampment

But that kind of world wasn’t his lair

Ended up at a trailer park

Miles from where good people gleam

Stuck in a longbox on wheels

Just another bland, human sardine

It made him bitter enough

But he had felt that street vibe, protecting his stuff

 

A neighbor with lots to say

Started giving him her opinions

He bared his teeth like a badger, crazed

The bitch went running in another direction

Soon enough, he had no friends

No one dared to get close

But even from a distance there was a smell

Of sweat and bourbon from his clothes

He didn’t crave companionship at all

Spent his days staring at the trailer walls

 

Eventually that baseball bat

Found its way into his hands

He sat out by the front porch, waiting

For any fool with a wish to be slammed

Eyes peeled of their onion skins

Ready to look deep into the dark

He was the odd man out

At the mobile village park

Many rumors started to swirl

The figured he was lonely without a steady girl

 

Then came a day of reckoning

He woke up from an outside nap

Started cursing and spitting

And tugging at his trucker cap

The commotion carried far

They could hear it up and down the street

He belched and crushed cans all day

Sat there kicking and stomping his feet

He was armed with his post of shaved wood

Shouted, “I wish a motherfucker would!”

 

Then a bullet from next door let fly

Some domestic dispute got out of hand

A sheriff’s deputy had to quell

A fight between a woman and a man

Both of them were quarreling

In a way that threatened the public peace

Gunfire shattered the Walmart radio

The Country tunes rudely ceased

That urban immigrant was felled

Went face-down, right where he dwelled

 

Nobody knew him well enough

To fill out a burial claim

His body stayed abandoned with the county

No request filed, for his remains

All around those clustered lots

There was a shared sigh of relief

The whole neighborhood was glad

To be rid of their boorish, drunken beast

A cranky, crabby malcontent

Off to eternity, the poor bastard gent

 

With a matter of months, elapsed

The mobile box got a new resident

Some other hopeless, hapless rube

Living on a slab of cement

Stuck inside a single-wide

Like letters in a postal slot

Coughing phlegm and Marlboro reds

Shooting Bud Light, and sniffling snot

That was a better match, by far

Than the old dude who had been living in his car

 

No tears were cried as an afterthought

The memory was forgotten

Nobody gave a shit about

What a work of fate had begotten

Gossip said that the urban man

Had been planted in an unmarked grave

Up the hill at a township field

Where veterans and grandparents were laid

It was all for the best

Like cracked eggshells, left in an empty nest