Brotherly Love (Crimmins Poetry Prize Honorable Mention)

Philly all the emo with none of the moshpit.
Philly free jazz in a trashbag.

Philly’s a synthetic weave tumbleweed down 69th street.
Philly’s Schuylkill punch brown and meek mill’s cadence for an anti-depressant.

Philly’s a rust covered trolley rail used as a balance beam for cat sized rats.
Philly’s a mouse that stands in the middle your living-room wondering what you staring at.

Philly’s when the scent of urine feels comfortable.
Philly’s a crackhouse where someone pulls out an ipod touch.

Philly’s the seasoning left in potato chip bag, littered because fuck you.
Philly’s bulletproof glass protecting blunt wrappers and raisinets.

Philly’s a bed sheet ad for pet colonics.
Philly’s four empty barber shops in a two block radius.

Philly is abandoned midnight unsafe even if desert.
Philly looks at anything but you as intensely as it can.

Philly is dubstep basement row-home hot pagan light-show for nobody Philly.
Philly’s a cafe a bored new jersey dreamed into existence.

Philly bucktoothed street with caution tape floss.
Philly flosses through beirut in a hooptee.
Philly ain’t no white car.
Philly For Sale sign.

Philly loose dutch tobacco on the 23. Philly loose money. Philly is cheap.
Philly chirps. Philly speaks it’s first words. Philly lounges.

Philly is waiting.
Philly is waiting.
Philly is waiting and the teams choke.
The kids choke.

The fey smokers identical outside the whiskey bar chain smoke like it’s new orleans downtown.
The buses weeze.

The roads are cracked and the sidewalk’s grow flowerbeds beneath them.
Philly grows and shrinks. Screams “back door” but doesn’t tell you to step down.

Doesn’t speak. Gets cut. Names.
A paradox laughing at itself. The old friend with no money

            and a ugly mouth.


Warren Longmire is a web programmer, game developer, poet and part-time philosopher. He’s been published in Painted Bride Quarterly, Metropolary, Eleven Eleven and two chapbooks: Ripped Winters and Do.Until.True, but what he really wants to do is direct. He currently resides in Philly across from a former Mausoleum with one roommate, one bluetooth karaoke machine and a pet python named Fugee.
You can find his writings, essays, videos and sounds at dountiltrue.tumblr.com and soundcloud.com/wclongmire.