Sunday, October 17, 2010

Road


NARRATIVE 4

In record time you found yourself a little less lost,
the vertigo inside your skull humming
like a piece of abandoned electronics,
or a musty kazoo with no music left inside it,
and began trekking back home,
bearing hard right at the skatepark
its disuse filling up with standing rain,
then straight for two miles
past banks of wild, colorless flowers
and in the road there were
piles of dingy squirrel pelts,
and plastic bottles of prescription medicine
and instruction manuals
for vaguely prosthetic devices.
As you thumbed through each,
the yearning you felt
to be made better, more, made no sense.
You could see a man
setting fire to his arm,
which you had to assume was an accident,
as he waved it wordlessly.
It looked like a flag
announcing dominion,
even as he vanished into the backyard.
Dogs were barking and
then they were quiet
and people issued from their homes
passing questions
one to the other
as if this were a shared dream.
You wanted to say
what this place obviously was.
What had happened.
To tell them to return to their tolerable dinners.
To go back inside.
Because the silence had gone
and this at last was loss,
or what you had guessed it might be for a long time.
You wanted to leave.
You did.

1 comment:

Errant said...

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I really like your blog!

If you're interested, please stop by my blog where I'm writing some haiku poetry and give me your opinion :)

www.of-pictorial.blogspot.com

Thanks