Where were the young men?

Where were the young men with their heads dipped into books
the day the ponds flooded over?
Onto the streets the homeless took apart their can
collections and cut them into tin canoes
that floated down the streaming gutters all rainbow-dinge and gasoline.
No one really knew what to make of the whole scene,
as there was something hauntingly apocalyptic
yet beautifully ephemeral about this particular puddle.

No thoughts, no words cross the young men's minds.
Just images within ink characters. When they read
an individual page they found a year's worth of art
in the font's shape and the typewriter's ink ribbon dust stamped.
There was nobody but the homeless outside,
the rest had aligned
themselves along the street in the huts and
staircase'd closed-door victorian-imitation 1980s-style mid-level cost-friendly
inauthentic
but truly empty wallet homes.