The Rex Is Dead

Another one comes down—across
the street from where I use to go

down nightly
into daily into morning. No more

hardware to sell. Only rubble and blue and yellow
painted brick remain

in a cloud of heat
intensified dust. Kitty corner, I am

salvage after a wrecking
ball of my own

undoing swings through.

No Empty

No time to mourn, to encounter
rubble in a hole
before retail monster walls
rise above. Dismantling 

December air, live
instruments and raw
voices not welcome
in this symmetrical disaster. 

Uptown bans all scars.