The Ramshackle Bagatelle

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.