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Saturday 25 January 2014

Bait

.


Christian Fellowship Church and Bait Shop, Vallejo, California: photo by efo, 21 January 2014


Long shadows cast by distant dying sun fall
downhill

People living half
in and half out of
total abandonment

The time Safeway's freezer failed
and all the perishables
ended up in the dumpster
at once

is still spoken of as a historic day
but tonight
with that hard northeast wind biting again
on the streets
nobody would want
a half melted Sara Lee frozen apple pie





Turkeys. They're everywhere (abandoned building, Touro University, Mare Island, Vallejo, California): photo by efo, 19 January 2014



Dumpster: photo by efo, 18 January 2014

6 comments:

ACravan said...

I've never seen or read anything quite like this; it's very powerful and effective and cuts through. Amazing also the way efo's photographs were taken so recently and yet seem timeless, or rather completely outside of time and therefore permanent. Curtis

mistah charley, ph.d. said...

Joan Osbourne - Pensacola

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f_v9x3khsQ

TC said...

Thanks, Curtis.

The work of efo continues to inspire. A very unusual combination of talents -- technical proficiency, a great eye, a terrific dry sense of humour, and above all, a desire to show the truth. That last quality, the honesty, I consider the rarest of all, in our present historical environment.

TC said...

Sorry Charley, hadn't seen yours.

Yeah, that must be the bait shop guy.

He said, "If you've come to take the car away
I don't have it anymore
I don't have it anymore"

Those warm waters sound... well, at least warm, anyway.

But we have a variety of special offerings this week.

Mare Island: Vacation Destination

Mose23 said...

Increasing numbers of people living out of dumpsters here. More and more churches offering food parcels - sometimes you'll find working people in the queues (so much for the drop in unemployment).

The covered over history shows up here.

TC said...

As a general rule, the more expensive the market, the better protected the dumpsters and trash bins, hereabouts. The biggest moneymakers have the biggest fences around their bins of otherwise perfectly edible discarded goods, thus keeping the goods away from the poor and hungry. Food is simply wasted in the name of The Way Our Society Does Business.

Back in the days when I was still able to get round on foot I had the acquaintance of many members of that ragtag community of scavengers who patrol the bins and dumpsters of the night.

One fellow had burrowed into a crevice between a dumpster and a fence, and for some weeks was sleeping rough in that narrow space, until the police rousted him out.

An intelligent and sensitive young black man, a threat to no one.

But he had prior, and went back to the county jail.