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how much do we need? will it always increase?

Mansions
============

Oh, I hear the louder ones laugh
And talk their sports scores
As they drink coffee with the daybreak

I watch them notch their heavy belts
and enter through the cavernous mouth
of what’ll soon be a three car garage…

How can all these young kids afford such things?

Then, they start a hammering and sawing away
workboots echo on the hollow floors
voices curse and voices call
and drills screetch
to twisted, all of the sudden
stops

With my cats and coffee I sit,
in this little old pink two bedroom
sinking now in the cold shadow
of my neighbors-to-be
At my kitchen window now, there’s a wall
where these forty-odd years
I always liked to watch the sunset.

would I have ever imagined
a Mansion going up next door to me?
Who’s moving in? A king, and queen?
Here, on quiet Sunset street?

In nineteen seventy,
we finally saved up enough money
to put up a one car garage…
I remember the pride in Howard’s eyes
it was the weekend before
the fourth of July

We had a garden then, and no, it was’nt much
But the girls and me kept it perfect
My little sunburned Emmy would bring in green onions, and juicy bellpeppers
for me to dice them up into
the eggsalad sandwiches
I’d send along with Howard
in a brown paper sack,
back when he worked the railroad…

Now, the girls have long since
finished up school,
both have married off…
And the Diabetes took Howard in 93’
And mostly, all the old neighbors have passed, or moved away…

And again I hear those workboots clopping
and now I’m just waiting
for them to come up one morning
and pull a big, white sheet
over my house.

-RS Petranek 05/04/04