Disconnection and disassociation,
From old jobs, old apartments, and houses.
Like I'm a ghost who'd fragmented into so many pieces and places,
Who's hauntings connect me to these people and locations.

Chains that bind one another in an eternal embrace of love and despising,
Tired bones in a youthful frame,
Disjointed memories and discombobulated thoughts,
In grey mush contained by a dome,
Perpetuating thoughts along neural highways and electrical connections,
Riding a lattice-work of joints and tendons,
Bringing a lumbering machine of flesh and carbon,
Through this odd and enthralling plain.

12 jobs,
9 cars,
78 Summers,
5 partners,
Such odd yet specific numbers.

Grains of sand through an aperture,
Tick tick tick goes the pocket watch,
Tock tock tock goes the grandfather clock,
Bing **** goes the church tower,
Cookoo goes the antiquated clock.

Seconds, minutes, hours, days.
Glimpses, figments, memories, experiences.

Snippets, songs, albums, discographies.
EP, LP, Concepts, compilations.

Take a breath and see what you can,
For here one minute,
Gone the next,
For the Law of Averages is the way things have always gone,
And the way it's always went.

Levon Helm haunts my ears this morning,
As I drive up 127 with the top down,
Passing by Montezuma,
So I can see a most peculiar sight.

There's a town in an Ohio,
Where time seems to have been frozen,
A singular main street of tall buildings,
Surrounded by fields of corn and soy,
Where I have only seen blue skies and sunshine.

Like Springsteen's song the band is covering,
It seems to be a town of perpendicular and parallels,
Booming business amidst rust belt squalor,
A mixture of broken souls of the old,
Sprinkled throughout the shining and smiling faces of the young,
Looking forward to escaping?
Or maybe content in their little slice of 80's America?

There is a lake that is the namesake of the town,
Or maybe it's the other way around?
That borders this town on it's eastern side,
And for long I have always wished to just take a day and sit upon it's shore,
To take a day and just breath.

It was honestly a mistake that first brought me through this sleepy town,
All those years ago,
Through this odd land surrounded by forests of windmills,
That stretch to the horizon like fields full of planted and forgotten giant's pinwheels,
That took me from Detroit to Cincinnati by way of the Indiana border,
And arriving here felt like a surreal dream.

Just a silly 18 year old,
How was I to understand the uniqueness of this place I'd stumbled upon?
But going back up a year later,
A calling I felt deep in my bones,
To see if it was more than a dream,
So return I did,
And to my surprise it still remained,
This analogue paradox in such a digital age.

10 years later,
And it is all the same,
As if the world outside doesn't matter,
And perhaps it never would.

I pass through slowly,
Waving back at the residents that throw up a hand in greeting,
Such a antiquated greeting that still kept alive in this time capsule town,
And as I pass through it's district,
As quickly as I came,
A warmth remains,
Some nostalgic sensation for something I have barely experienced as a kid,
Or perhaps only imagined I did.

How's your heart,
If your heart was a tank of gasoline?
Is it full of rich, high octane jet fuel?
Or is it sputtering,
With only the dregs of several month old junk at the bottom?
Filled with iron oxide sediment and dirt?

The door swing violently on hinges,
Being slammed open from my hurried retreat,
Breath burning in my lung from a headlong sprint,
Running from pain and rejection,
Running from potential jeers and slants made against me.

You weren't strong enough,
You weren't fast enough,
Why didn't you see it sooner,
WHY DIDN'T YOU SAVE HIM?!?

Tears streaming from eyes burning in shame,
Feet hurting from the force of being slapped bare against asphalt,
As the road gives way to grass.

You could have been better,
You could have done more,
Why didn't you see it sooner,
WHY DIDN'T YOU SAVE HIM!?!

Blood dripping from nails digging into palms,
Vision tunneling,
Head light,
Self hatred building.

I wasn't kind enough,
I wasn't there in time,
Why didn't I see it sooner,
WHY DIDN'T I SAVE HIM?

....

Legs give as muscles cramp,
Vision slowly returns,
Finding myself alone in the woods,
Silence blankets all around.

Breath returns to normal,
And sense finally returns,
The cutting words still gnawing in the background,
Should have never given them a chance to get a foothold.

Slowly returning,
Plodding steps sending up twinges of pain from raw bare feet,
Returning to the normal world.

She walks through a once destroyed field,
Bare feet slipping through tall grass upon this warm and clear summer day,
A place once filled with shattered rifle and hewn shield,
Crater-filled like the surface of the moon,
Now but small divots from where artillery shells were sent their way.

Her hair the color of spun gold and copper,
Looks out upon the grave of equipment and limbs,
Overgrown with wildflowers and sapling acting as shims,
Filling the spaces where corpses were dropped where men once stood,
Stood tall and proud for the sake of honor.

Green eyes flecked with silver,
Peer into both present and past,
Looking out upon both abject horror and utter beauty,
At ghosts long past and young men,
Looking into eyes filled with dread and deadness one moment,
And the next with exuberance and naivety.

Step by step she crosses these hill filled plains,
Teaming with life,
Where once not even the rats could survive.

Gentle breeze kisses her cheek,
Where once it would have been blistered by gas,
An elemental force providing a cooling sensation,
Once upon a time it would have been nothing but burning and fire.

Bees lazily drift across the visage,
Where once it would have been bullets,
And at this she freezes and her heart breaks,
Looking at what she sees.

In this duality she sees a young man,
Crying and clenching at his chest,
Laying in one of the small divots that adorn the land,
And at the same time she sees only a skeleton adorned in tattered cloth,
Still in silent in the final sleep.
She crouches down beside the boy/skeleton and gently caresses his cheek,
At this the boy looks up and stops his shrieks,
Gazing upon this angel in a land where not even the devil would tread.

A ghost of a smile graces his lips,
As a dulling takes place in his eyes,
The pulsing blood slows and stops,
And the specter of explosions slowly fade to wind through the grass once again.

She stands,
And continues on her way,
Witness to a hell made heaven,
In a field of France on a summer day.

Gentle brushes upon a strong back,
Clouds of dirt going airborne with each pass,
A metaphorical cleansing of my own soul parallels the cleaning of the coat.

Gentle eyes that peer past barriers,
Caring not for the ****** past that is seen behind the walls,
But instead focusing on the soul that built them,
Perhaps there's some good there?

Scraping muck and awful from ***** hooves,
Shedding spiritual mud and dirt from crevices in my heart,
Making it lighter with each pass.

Tack is put on,
The gentle creak of leather and tinkling of metal buckles and clasps,
Tightening down violent thoughts and keeping them secured.

Bit gently slipped in,
Caring being taken to ensure a comfortable fit,
Control being given back to my life.

A step into a stirrup and with a swing of a leg being settled upon the back of this beautiful creature,
Ears tilted back,
Listening to her rider.

Peace,
Contentment,
Healing.