The old man smoking
outside my trailer park
Has choked on his
willpower to live, once more.
Glossy, thick, and
persistent, delightfully dark
He keeps it safe
with his snuff, his secret store.
I've seen it shining
in his eye, like billion missing stars
Blink, and it's
staring at you unceasing, from his hand.
There's resilience
in people here, like the decaying cars
A sort of crooked
perversion of mankind's last stand.
Is this the edifice,
our spire, we left upon our land?
A stoned, unkempt
puppet of the heavenly cogs?
Our nobility dances
its swansong sarabande
To the incessant
baying of the sleepless dogs.
He laughs at me atop
a can, a worn down petrol drum
Age has licked us
all, but to him, irony is clear.
He shakes his head
and he massages his gum
Beneath the ashen
grey of the stratosphere.
There's no mobile
signal here, no memories for keeps
It feels like a
farce, a husk of a world, plain
Upwind from the
desert, a single strain of thought creeps
Through sludge
before being squashed in the drain.
The assassin might
find something funny in this wild
An elegy for lands
that never ceased to stop being
The thirsty stove
sings its song, ever beguiled
By the gilded vision
of salvation it's seeing.
I have long stood
here, pondering this rot
And why I'm a place
in its tableau
Where everything
just falls, nothing is got
Every eyebrow is
furrowed with woe.
I was born here, in
this very shed of rust
When I was a child,
it was lush and green
Now everything has
been subsumed by the dust
Barring any return
to how it had been.
The old man has
smoking been here every day
He chuckles and
offers me his oozing pipe
Tracing out the
heavens and laughing all the way
He says I am but a
boy, far too ripe.
Some day, maybe I
will be like he-
Mapping out my own
version of the truth
Perhaps it doesn't
matter, it's a leaf on a tree
But my eyes are
tinted by the lenses of youth.
This winter, I
decided to leave my decrepit home
And discover the
wiles of the myths of outside
But some strange
force guides me when I roam
Bringing me to this
place where I reside.
There's homeliness
found in the notches in our bones
And there's a
blessing that will let us persist.
A prayer etched into
the tired-out stones
That we will live
grasped by decay's wrist.
Perhaps that is the
goal we all seek
To find an
unconditional home to dwell
Marked by its own
trees and its little creek
Will I find one?
Only time will tell.
Till then, I will
weather the wind and foam
For it is far better
to finally fall
While discovering
your own place, your home
Than to never have
changed at all.
