the emt boys

                                             Introduction
                                         
                                         remains and the ruin
                         
                                  ( A vacant second story house efficiency,
                                   holiday wrapping papers, bushels of fiber glass,
                                   worn varsity jackets and seared bleached t-shirts
                                   personally hanged
                                   lonesomely within remote corner closets,
                                   a bucket of used cleaning effluent
                                   and three gallons of fluorescent orange ammonia,
                                   as city sewers bewailed oncoming nights,
                                   ravenous roars of incoming freights
                                   reverberating throughout a bleak county background,
                                   grim terrestrial outskirts contoured
                                   in ashen shades of wasted scrap-metal,
                                   junkyard trash piled in desolate concrete yards of yesterday,
                                   those decaffeinated morning routines culminated
                                   into dulled pantomimes of inbred futility)
                               
                                      The EMT boys packed up and ran off somewhere, leaving behind a cumbrous world of lifestyle commodities, no one knows why nor where, faded Thanksgiving portraits hung in broad abandoned hallways, years of dried-out gift packaging, not a soul to claim, a niece given to night-terrors on southern Jersey's sunny-side, embryonic shelved drawers of artificial seaweed, bought her a seashell alarm clock from an amusement park gift-shop that summer, accumulating dust beside a dusty family room converter box
                                      A man's daughter suffered and
                                       grew through his indulgent seasons,
                                      alcoholic sweat rained supremely down
                                      upon his fertile brow,
\                                     a good day's work didn't pay off anymore,
                                     drunken childhood pageants brimming in peacock feathers, recycled condoms and empty cardboard cases of Miller Genuine Draft, heartlessly throwing his family away into apartment complex dumpsters, working no longer, he drinks and saunters eastern beaches at night, lamenting himself with self-inflicted hymns of toxic nostalgia.
                                 All that vain energy spent, evenings in renovated department stores, coffee lunch break Wednesdays in darkened automobile garages,  A.M./F.M. radio sucked whatever life you had left in you, too many commercials, the same overplayed songs repeating themselves, they had good intentions
                                 we all did, eventually perishing in hollow centuries of harmful speculation,
                                 sentimental pillowcases of fallen angels, delicately twisted
                                  their lord and savior into
                                  woven covenants of tattered hope and repentance
                                  upon sallow evening dooryards, patches of green lawn undulated to steady breeze, in flickering moonlight premonitions, placid hours passed throughout empty residences, spectral visions of decadent heirlooms, meaningless sequences of vanquished domestication, sordid imagery of cape-cod weekends, short-lived grocery store triumphs, the love of a girl decades ago, or the warmth of a living room mantel in December,
                                 now, she's gone, a tumbler of Bailey's and a broken soul, solemn recollections of her in tight denim, smiling in familiar solidity, she was all yours, happy then, two hearts adjoined in eternity's misplaced storeroom,
                                  the EMT boys picked up six weeks before her, carelessly rolled-out with stuffed hungover suitcases,
                               we had no idea what we were initiating, no idea how things would turn, plotting our own catacombs in early February parking lots,
                                     next to a neighborhood liquor store, everyone played a role in our thinned out days and thawed out nights,
                                     except you
                                              or maybe
                                                   you did