Florida,
when it was known to me,
was a long land of strip malls and palm trees.
A long land of asphalt roadways and people
waiting on something
they pretended was not death.
The cast-aways of a culture that could not
strap their useless to a tree and leave them.

You could hear them in the grocery stores,
the thin lines of sweat beaded together
to crouch in the wrinkles of their flesh.
You could watch them in traffic,
sifting to the side like *******,
collecting itself and slowing down to naught.

It was not a happy place.
the sun reflecting in painted posters
and painted smiles, convincing those
who were not there.
Cold drove them down en masse,
large four-lane-highway flocks of them,
with winter adverts that lingered on
snowed-in, New England cable televisions,
telling of a thing that did not exist.

Florida,
when it was known to me,
was a land of dark, high-waisted palms
lining roads thick with *******,
asphalt glowing in its heat-induced mirage.
everything seeming off, distant,
everything somewhere else.

You could walk along the pavement,
feeling your feet echo upward from your
shoe-soles, watching the white-haired movement
of traffic, and almost remember
everything the world had ever thrown away.