Tonight,
I play hide and seek
With ghosts
As thunder gods clap
Quarter-note beats at my window.
The ghosts are familiar to me:
Their names slip from my lips
As they wander through my halls
And remind me of footsteps I used to chase
Before they'd arrived.
The sky decides to join in our little game,
Sheds tears for graves dug out for old memories
That died long ago.
I set up delayed funeral marches,
Play new records
Too catchy, not enough scratchy,
Not enough backward-glances into the past—
All just the way I meant it to be.
I give out half-baked eulogies
And recount their short lifespans—before they prematurely died
Of respiratory failure
Leading to angina—the heart throwing in the towel.
The oxygen of dreams present
Turned and suffocated me with monoxide,
Became the poison I'd been warned
Could kill dreams.
Instead, it greedy-handed-choked me.
But I
Am strong enough still
To dig graves from the rain drenched mud
As thunder gods and ghosts watch me
Bury past burdens
My back
Can no longer carry as I move
Forward.
YOU ARE READING
Cityscape
PoetryA collection of poems written in the city. Written for city folk who don't quite belong. And for everyone else who fall in between the cracks of 'here' and 'there.'
