William Taylor Jr.

The Broken Hearts of Larkin St. 

(A winner of the HCR 15th Anniversary Prize)

It's all just drinking wine and waiting
for the next terrible thing to arrive,

harboring visions of something like mercy
despite the universe having no history of such.

The slow and tedious decay of things
hums along in time with the tune
of how it is we became this way.

We're shuffling through the hours
along the path of least resistance

with eyes like those of children
in old photographs,

hearts full of lukewarm ash,

desperate for something to cram in our blood
that's stronger than religion or drugs.

It's the future now and  the driverless cars  
drift like ghost machines in the night

and for $12.99 a month
the chatbots will send us nudes
and tell us that our poems are pretty

but there's nothing for the broken hearts of Larkin St.

where the driverless wheelchairs
lay on their sides where they fall.

I like to imagine there's still a chance
that the lost and the dead and the forgotten

will rise up with the fury of every wasted year
burning inside them

and tear down the world and everything,
stoke the loneliness at the heart of it

into a fire so great that god might see
and finally be ashamed.