Feed More run along Route One
the old Jeff Davis now Richmond Highway
its street signs the only new things around.

Turn off to the neighborhoods behind.

A mix of old homes, some kept up with painted porches
an occasional larger place with a manicured lawn

but mostly the bedraggled salt boxes, the trailer parks,
the sagging window AC’s, the rusting chain link fences,
the wheelless cars on jacks, the rutted pavement.

My clients crack the door sucking oxygen from hoses
on a cane or a walker, make an effort to smile.

Or you open to a hoarder’s stash, old man reclined
on a hospital bed the blasting tv at his feet
next stop a woman likewise arranged, says,
close the door quick – don’t let out my cat!

Second richest county in the seventh richest state
in the wealthiest nation in the world. 

Pull off Hwy 1 into a trailer park older than you are
and you are not young.  People coping as they can. 

Homes decay into the red clay.
Cold hearts & kudzu conspire to blanket it all.