MY FIRST MANCHESTER POEM

If you squint your eyes a little

And look to your right

As you cross the Notre Dame Bridge at night

From the west to the east side
Of beautiful Manch Vegas, Cow Hampsha,

My home away from home-town,

You would get the illusion

That the lights regularly spaced

In the parking garage on the other side

Of the mighty Merrimack

Glimmer like jewels evenly set

Perhaps a diamond belt

Around the waist of the burg

That calls itself the Queen City.

But nah, it ain’t so,

And once you disabuse yourself

Of that notion and look to the left

Crossing that selfsame bridge

You spy the swanky condos on the corner

That never got completely sold

And probably never will,

Having been built on one side of the

Real estate boom, the good side,

And trying to be sold on the bad side..

Anyway, look at it from the back,

All white, starts squat, ends up towering

In the middle, with brick clad sides,

In my mind’s eye I see the superstructure

Of a funky, old time cruise ship.

In my mind’s eye. Sometimes

You gotta let your mind play tricks

With your logic, or the city

Will swallow you up.

Actually, this is a city of illusions

And pretentions.

A couple fairly tall buildings

The locals like to think of as skyscrapers.

Apparently they’ve never taken a trip

An hour south to Boston

To see the real thing.

And most of the commercial property

Seems owned by one landlord.

I have a suggestion…

Instead of Manchester,

Why not let’s call it

Brady Sullivania? That would work.

It’s a blue collar city

That would like you to think

It’s white collar,

A destination city

If your destination

Is a dead end,

Like both ends of its main street.

The realest things in town

Are a group of old building beasts

That seemingly graze

Hunched down on either side of the river,

Like brick red dinosaurs, fewer now than before

But still there.

Even those, however, have lost some of their real.

They used to devour men and women,

Stout millworkers, and disgorge miles of wool

Armies of shoes, locomotives, whatever.. BIG stuff

Now they’ve become gentrified, rehabbed,

And spew out college students, lawyers,

And bric-a-brac unheard of a century ago,

Nothing a REAL factory could be proud of.

Maybe the only real thing left

Is the children’s museum scale model

Of the brick red building beasts

The way they looked back in the day

But then maybe not. They’re not brick and mortar,

Only LEGOS

Millions and millions of LEGOS

Chip Bergeron

October 5, 2012