PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I lit a new incense and settled on my mat. It smelled more like a head shop than a Hindu temple, like the Penguin Feather I used to buy records at when I was a teenager, in the days when smoking paraphernalia was relegated to the back corner of blacklit music stores. Wedged between a palm reader and the Heidelberg Inn restaurant, with its dark interior bedecked in Black Forest imagery, where everyday was Oktoberfest, and across the highway from the infamous Cherry Arms Hotel (known to be a "house of ill repute", called in those days a "massage parlour"), it was the sleazy stretch of Route 1, equidistant from Ft. Belvoir and Capitol Hill as to be frequented by GIs and politicians alike (so the occasional vice raid revealed). Interestingly this seedy area was just below and a stones throw away from St. Luke's, the church my mother and I attended all the Sundays of my youth. When I think about it now, did all our sins cast out in curtained confessionals, said to be absolved by Hail Marys and Our Fathers, those deeds thought dirty in the damnation of our self-righteousness, flow down the hill and pool there in that sordid section of  town?