Magz Wright - Mapleton Grove

Mapleton Grove was a place of its own.
Plastic, nearly neon green spikes that exist nowhere else,
grew up out of the lawns.
Neighbors conversed eagerly every morning,
only to check a million times at night
to make sure their doors are locked.
Everyone knew each other well,
basically speaking in a language that no outsider could understand.
An outsider like me.

Day one I walked, lost
Among hundreds of identical shiny black mailboxes.
Their bright, yet glazed, eyes could not see me;
did not want to.
Nobody wanted chains in a world of soft pink sweaters
tied around shoulders.

As I gagged on the unpleasant mixed scent
of pastries and chlorine (for there were no other smells,
like a blank sheet of paper) ,
wandering past the same white-shuttered house for the twelfth time,
night began to eat the day.
Mapleton Grove molted into something else;
a festering exploration.

Through a window, above a scentless flowerbox,
I could see a crack of life inside.
Carelessness hadn’t shut them off completely.
My new neighbor’s wife
was being held in a house that wasn’t hers,
by a man that was not her mustached husband.

Was every house
behind the curtains,
as juicily sweet on these perfectly asphalted streets?
If I snuck up real close, just a breath away,
and peek in,
would I find more interesting secrets?
Sense couldn’t hold me back.

Mr. Eldrige had a fling with a man,
Desoto’s daughter fed a can.
Bottles covered Mrs. Vernon’s floor,
as her teenaged son fled out the door.
These were the people who hadn’t accepted me?

Now, every night, when the air hangs thick,
and small bugs drown in the overpopulation of pools,
I take a walk along the roads without bumps,
just to ‘visit’ the neighbors.
Nobody could quite creep
like the black sheep of Mapleton Grove.

Magz Wright

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/mapleton-grove/