NORWOOD LANDLORD

Like Telluride brokers managing properties for investors, rentals in the San Miguel’s box canyon have skyrocketed, putting an Aspenated high-end gun to the head of local shops. I mourn many main street losses, but particularly Delilah – a dispensary muscled out by the corporate green dragonate and hockeystick rents. 

Not wholly unlike what happened to Telluride’s award-winning local paper, the Watch, -- undercut by a Boulder conglomeratization that bought Clark Kent’s doppelganger, which in their hands, has devolved into an Investor News Organ of legals, centerfold real estate porn, desperate want ads for housing and unfilled job ads

My Norwood neighbor, hobbling on crutches from surgery and a fall, found herself unable to afford the steep Wrights Mesa rent increase (“to keep current with the Norwood market” she was told, but of course not for any improvement to the rural farmhouse itself) and had to move out by the first of the year. I helped. Hence this week’s poem.

MOVING OUT

A coming on of night after a turn 

as Mormon Lee ferrying

my ten-year neighbor’s hoard

cruelly pushed out

her rental pupa in the chrysalis of winter

to new digs

Burrow. Concrete boots

Not really. Nicer place

kind of

The P-J an underground surround of 

forest bathing

free from noisy Norwood’s dawn truckers

Ex-urban hot mics. Clinkers 

raked from Telluride’s dangerous 

rim