The vagabond, quothe Shakespeare in the ghetto laundromat.
Twixt softener and soap, he stood a sad figure cut, detached and quite mad.

Over and over the colors roll while the pauper player mumbles
Berating his brain to acquire the role, while the heated dryers tumble.

“Hold Thy Desperate Hand!” he cries, and the old black woman looks up
From her folding.  Her eyes have seen decades of cold and madmen enough.

“Hast Thou Slain Tybalt?!”  The question rings while dryers spin.
The office attendant, unattached, assesses the scene, then reads again.

Fie! Fie! Thou shamest thy shape, thy love, thy wit.
The Mexican children look round eyed while their lips hold the sip

Of the box drink straw. Focus in momentary limbo,
Reality presents a more intriguing sideshow

Than any Spanish animations on an old, tube television.
Here four hundred years time tested, the language holds imaginations.

And the lunatic is adrift, alone in his mind, as lunatics are,
Relishing the scene before Montague, vanished are Whirlpool and Kenmore

And the crowd of four is held captive, until the cycles cease.
Listening on about usury, good and bad fortunes and an ill-beseeming beast.

The vagabond quothe Shakespeare in the ghetto laundromat.
Twixt softener and soap, he stood a sad figure cut, detached and quite mad.


*6th place winner of Writer's Digest Annual Poetry Competition, 2017.