I see my city from a distance,
small points of light inscribe
the shapes of it's skyline against
a dark blue and purple night
and I know I am near home.
I lead a tired life
in ratty sneakers
and find myself on Pratt Street
well after the bars have closed
but before the sun.
I walk these streets and think
about the years of pavement
under my feet and the
people who populate my memories
and my city.
There are lives, being lead
in the quiet and ignored way
that city lives are,
behind every lit window.
My city isn't defined by
the height of it's buildings
and there is little neon,
but if you are very silent,
and more than a little patient,
you can hear her breathe.
My city is a portrait,
from Monument to Key Highway
and all points around and between.
I stand, in the stillness of the
streets well after the bars close,
and know that my story
has been played at different
points throughout her heaving mass.
And it is played now, by me and
the many millions like me.
We are a city united in our mutual
distaste and love for the buildings
and lights and cross streets
that house us and are our
home.

She would rub her feet,
in socks alone,
across the carpet.
She would carefully touch
nothing on her way out,
or at school.
Then she would reach out to him.

She had heard the myths
about love at first sight.
About a bolt of electricity
passing from one person
to another.
She tried so hard to recreate it.
To fake it.

Years later she would stare
out at the city from her
apartment and wonder
what tomorrow would bring.
She had become part
of a system that ignored her,
but she was used to that kind
of system.

At night she would write.
Fiction her plaything.
She would write stories
but she didn't let people
read them, because they
couldn't know that, this too,
was a part of who she was.

She had learned that
other people killed dreams.
With countless kindness.
They would talk about
how talented she was
until she felt confident.
But never confident enough
to show a publisher.
She liked her audience small
and appreciative.

Later still she would look
back on her life and wonder
what would happen if she
stood up and took the
chance.
Could she have moved,
with just her words,
other people to see her?

Could she have been
electricity?
Her thoughts,
her words,
moving from her
to another,
like love.

Push the ignition on
this endless waiting.
Find the purpose behind
hours of need
with zero payoff.
Find the taxes gone
and the bills paid
and the paycheck empty
and count it another in
a long line of the very
same day.

Post your feelings across
the void and hope
a voice calls back in text.
Because gone are the days
when we could stand
for things and let ourselves
cry out loud enough to be
heard.

Gone is the moment when
the method was undecided
and the purpose grand.
Oh, we know just how to do it,
but our causes have shrunk.
Rebuilding a word with lines
of code
and the promises stolen from us
by three generations
of people who meant well
but delivered chaos and grinning
apathy.

We were great once,
I hear it all the time.
But with the buildings coming down
and the march of what
we can no longer call
progress,
I'm finding a disturbing lack
of evidence that
we were ever more than
what little we are.

Our voices have been caged
by the the things that were
meant to broadcast them.
We have been silenced by
the application of free thought.
Is there irony in that?
Or is it just another sad reminder
of how we destroy beautiful things
because we fail, time and again,
to recognize our potential?

It's the waiting that does me in.
It's this day by day
same old same old
that has it's hooks in me.
I'm a generation trained to
be delivered up what I need.
I want to call out a battle cry
and propel us toward the ill defined
"great" we could be.
But my generation doesn't have
a voice.
We only just barely have a name.

If there was time to sleep,
I would dream larger
than mountains.
My fingers would rake
the pale sky and leave
streaks of the cosmos
in their wake.
I would conquer fear,
and death.
I would laugh at entropy.
Heat death wouldn't harm me.
I would stand my ground
among the myriad humiliations
of endless days.
I would let out all
the things that I keep in
and no more would I stand
a monster, but become
free as a cleansed man.
Obstinate structures would
never stand in my path
to rewards earned.
I would force the *******
world to a halt to hear
my words and beat
the rhythm my world
moves to.
A billion what ifs
would stretch before me
as I plucked the strings
of maybe to arrange
a song that matches
the perfect version of my life
But of course,
there is no time to sleep.
There is only now
and what is waiting.

We have burned the bridges. All.
We have lit the match.
We have watched it fall.
I no longer know the voice
when you call.

We are not friends or lovers.
We are now absentee voters.
We are nothing to each other.
Forget the times we were better,
like when we would dance,
remember nothing of us together.
We never had a chance.

When a thing is dead,
good and truly over,
Nothing more is said.
We move on in silence
and put the past to bed.

Don't look for me in torchlight,
on the other side of this chasm,
I am vanished into goodnight
with dreams of almost had it
and fresh wounds from the old bite.

We have burned the bridges. Every one.
And with the coming day
we squint into the sun.
We are heavy handed, cold
and in silence we are undone.

Cryptic warnings in
dusty old books.
Lose floorboards and
cuts from fishing hooks.
Memories that aren't mine,
transferred over airwaves
and across time.
Lifetimes of bitter motes
metered out and measured in
Television tropes.

Sam and Diane until Rebecca
moved in.
I recall Coach's signature move,
taking it on the chin.
Frank until Winchester,
Better or worse,
Hawkeye and Trapper/BJ
ever perverse.

It's not who I am.
Not steps I've taken.
I remember it crisp as
overcooked Bacon.

German/Irish as the rest of
White America,
with none of the German Efficiency
and less of the Irish Luck.

Tired and Twenty-Seven,
though some Forty years olds
think I'm their age,
and too overworked to see that
this is all building to something.

I hope it's building to something.

No tattoos and still loads of regrets,
a great wife,
a good life,
but no time to breathe when the
day ends.

My god I love her.
Does she know the things I do for her?
Does she notice that these
years I've added to my birth age
are in service of my feelings for her?

I hope it's building to something.

The second half of the eighties saw me enter.
How is it that less than thirty years on
I'm creaking when I stand and one night's missed
sleep ruins up to three weeks?

I hope it's building to something.