Way out,
further than one would walk
where there are no sidewalks
and the side of the road is dust and thorns and small tiny melons of no consequence and occasional vultures become more-often-than-not vultures
where there is nothing but walnut groves and train tracks,
three of us found a place to cut loose
and be the punks we hoped to be.
Way out,
we found a few patches of weeds,
abandoned farm equipment,
decayed everything,
a toppled barn,
and a dry canal,
so we brought spray paint,
****** beer,
and threw rocks at passing trains.
We built bonfires and howled
no one cared.
Until an old man in a wrinkled hat
pulled his truck in to the tall grass
and watched us.
We hid our cigarettes as if he cared.
I walked over to check
but before I could give some poor excuse for our behavior,
he said,
“I was born here.”
Here?
This place was nothing. It was way out.
Old silos, maybe.
No houses.
No town.
No place to be born.
Just a place for kids like us to scrawl graffiti on pallets and rusted forgotten truck trailers.
“Used to be a town,” he said.
“Your standing in the post office.”
At my feet a cement slab crumbled into the white dust.
It is here that I wish this poem was about a tender moment
where an old man taught a young man about some hidden past.
Or that this poem reminded us about the secrets hidden all around us, if we just look.
It could be about a regained wonder for our elders or about memory or a certain flower that he pointed out which blooms in the ghost towns of our nostalgias and how that flowers Latin name means something that becomes a grand metaphor for rebirth...
But it’s not and he drove off without another word.
We picked up our spray paint and threw beer bottles against the canal bank, shattering them in a place no one would notice
except that old man,
who would see my vulgarity
and poor attempt at protest haphazardly sprayed
over the last place he can remember seeing his mother, by the backdoor,
that autumn evening he left and took that job in Sacramento.
