No Place Like Home

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 Tap your red heels Dorothy

There is no place like home

Cause home just isn't home no more

You wonder where it's gone

The farm you used to live on

Your uncle sold the land

There's rows of houses now

Where rows of wheat were wont to stand

The local grocery store

Became a giant megamart

And your poor Auntie Em

Can barely push the plastic cart

The farmhands you so loved

Well, they all lost their jobs

They wait for unemployment checks

and became drunken slobs

Professor Marvel's wagon

Was taken by the bank

They had to repossess it

When his show went in the tank

Miss Gulch is in a nursing home

She chased a dog and tripped

She fell down in her garden

Now she's got a broken hip

So if you come back Dorothy

Home's not like it was before

You may say to Toto

We're not in Kansas anymore!

submitted for Poets United, Thursday Think Tank, #84 Home

Help Wanted

image source

Families living in cars
Men sleeping on heating grates
     with newspaper blankets
Weary women begging for quarters
     so their children can eat
Fighting with dogs and rats for scraps of food
Nameless, faceless nobodies
Wandering the land of milk and honey
Stepping in sticky, dried puddles of beer and urine
Looking for streets paved with gold
Dying on streets covered with blood

submitted for May Poetry Challenge, unemployment, at Verse in a Nutshell