Urban Tumbleweeds

Rolling and floating through the blighted
bankrupt streets in this city of once-proud
mill stacks, now standing like somber sentinels
overlooking our turgid tumbling river, they rise
on unseen currents, these silent spirits,
occasionally crackling their strange styrene
alien song.
Of what do they sing, these checkout-stand
castaway cousins of prairie-prancing sages
from the West?
Not of abandoned saloons with ruined batwing
doors or ancient, windswept country
cemeteries, with their stones tilted in the dust
like old teeth; but of tattered toys and empty
trash cans, overturned from sanitary abuse and
making their escape to some wild urban
coaster ride; a madman's merry-go-round of
low alleys and shattered glass, glinting
dully in the setting summer sun.