What are you supposed to do when you return to a ghost town?
Do you walk among the dead, pretending to belong,
breathing from a straw as you watch the shallow water rush over your senses:
filling your ears with the same white noise you tried so hard to run away from,
bombarding your mouth and consuming the space your voice would perch before it decided to fly,
making your gaze so blurred you're never sure exactly how shallow you've become or how far you've sunk,
wrinkling your fingerprints and numbing everything but the constant rushing of a thin layer of blue silk,
you cling to the memory of the tulips you paused to smell as it's replaced with the eerie aroma of copper…
but that straw, those frantic shallow breaths, is all that keeps you from floating along the stream of sleepwalkers that litter this town.
This valley is a cage and every tunnel you see makes your heart whisper
"You're almost there."
In a city where nothing stretches for the ever-clear postcard sky
except the fumes of the local factory,
the people crawl between city blocks whose red lights
cast a net crafted for salmons at narcissistic sardines.
The suburbs are quiet on school nights, at weekend's dusk, in holiday's dawn.
Teenagers who have lost interest in the quiet are up late either coughing up ****** or SAT scores,
all searching for a heartbeat they forgot how to feel,
straws protruding from their lips like unlit cigarettes.
Their eyes are cloudy, pupils expanded, the whites bulging with pulsing red rivers, delving deep into a landscape the world forgot.
They shuffle next to you, faces purple from the lack of oxygen, but they'll never say so because
haven't you heard?
the walking dead tend to eat the living.