If the Devil Won

‘The roses would talk. They would tell passerbys
The wrong direction to “She loves me not.”
The cats would be the only ones who knew.
They would stretch out all day, silent as thieves
Who lost their pants.

‘The old men would sit in the sun,
The sound of the banjos
Slowly making them blind.
The houses would look at each other
And tell their life stories
In the dead of night.

‘All this will come to pass,’ he says,
And then we ate some bread, in silence.