The ball rolls, bounces and spins.
The crowd holds its breath,
anticipating, against the odds,
their magic number.

It stops. Money, in small plastic chits,
designed to lessen the loss,
changes hands.
And it begins again.

The wild card. The odd number,
the stacked odds when you play with fate,
all for the thrill, your mind lost
to passion and hope and the excitement

of beating the odds.

I do not gamble. I have lost enough
to set myself up for loss yet again.
There is no thrill in the game.
I have been drained of hope and pretense

that the fates favor me.
Better to run under their radar,
to deprive them of the chance to crush my hopes
and leave me broken.

I have become a student of the old ways.
Simple. True. Faithful.
I need less now than then, and with that less,
I have more to lose.

Leave others to play. They believe
in their place in the pantheon of gods and fates.
You watch, wondering how long they can lose
and still believe.

No one in town can tell you
exactly when they closed the plant,
but it was a generation ago.

Young generations, with children of their own
cannot recall it anything but what it is today:
an empty ghost of a building,

a place their parents speak of,
once bustling, now habited
by the occasional homeless soul

until they too, are chased away.
The canal runs past,
shallow water running fast

for no purpose.
An indelible, empty landmark.
It draws you, a grim reminder

of your own empty past,
of dark windows and broken things
and memories of purpose lost.

You go in.
It is dark and dusty inside. Cobwebs abound.
Most everything salvageable has been pillaged

or spray-painted with graffiti,
messages from the lost boys who never knew
this place as it was.

There is a strange art to it.
Half history, half a storage hall
for ancient dreams and promises.

You linger in wonderment,
that such enterprise could be made worthless
by the scratch of an accountant’s pen,

and just like that, becomes a mausoleum.
A holder of dead hopes.
It is at times, too close to the bone. Except

for this one thing:
Yours is a tale of resurrection,
and when you are done with your explorations.

you will walk again
in the sun.
Hopes intact and shining.

It is a room of chairs.
Their thin spindles let the light through,
visually almost invisible,
easy to move about the room,
to reconfigure as people come and go,
with no sense of mass or weight,
always room for one more, one less,
a different sort of life,
one that allows for constant change,
ebb and flow,
never too much,
never too little,
a shape-shifting goldilocks kind of room.

You feel strangely at home here,
an older version of Alice in Wonderland,
never quite yourself,
never quite what others expect,
never quite fitting in,
at least not in the way you expected.
The world has not made room for you.
You are tolerated
as long as you re-arrange your furniture
in the proper way
in the proper time.

Your eyes soak in the room,
so airy and bright,
and settle into a chair.
There is no one here but you
and the woman you love,
and it matters not where the chairs are
as long as there are two together.

You cannot find it
on the most recent maps.
Once you could.
A tiny dot in small print.
But not any longer.
It is too small.
In the middle of nowhere,
a confluence of four farms,
two roads,
an ancient Methodist church
and a country store turned museum.
If you happen to be there,
there is a sign.
Just one,
To announce your arrival and departure,
all in a blink. The sort of place
we make fun of,
or worse,
miss altogether.

And yet, people live here.
No fewer than they did in the day
when they rated a dot on the map in four-point type.
They are born here,
Grow up and age here.
Die here.
There is drama. Love is discovered
and lost.
Faith is found and lost.
They suffer, no fewer and no more
than a generation ago.

Your grandfather lived
on one of the four corner farms.
Your father was born here
and lay in the small oak crib
that now lives in your upstairs bedroom.
Your house, in fact, is a museum of sorts,
artifacts of generations scattered about,
proof that this place exists
not just in geography
but in soul.

Spanish moss hangs from the Live Oak,
a slow, beautiful murderer in the big city,
redolent of memories, blue music and smokey rooms,
drag queens crooning, a fight or two
late in the night while you sipped bourbon,
content in the corner,
listening less to the music than an internal dialogue,
devils and angels in your head
dancing a tattoo, making sultry peace with each other
as you scanned the crowd, seeking a distraction
as you courted oblivion at the stroke of midnight.

You sigh,
there is no glory in the memories. Life lived
and long ago discarded, without regrets
and without longing, happier to be in the light,
but parts of you were shaped by dark nights,
bluesy music and the grind of tinder before tinder,
a fire that never took in you,
a dead man in a plaid shirt in the corner of the bar
who somehow left more alive than he arrived.

At the midday tide, the boats are tied and secure,
survivors of another night gathering fish.
The small village has gone quiet,
save for a few tourists.

You are one of those tourists,
happier off the beaten path and familiar photo ops,
content to sit at the tiny coffee house for hours
and simply watch the ebb and flow of the town,

to hear strange language all around you,
to sit still enough, long enough
that you fit in, and disappear in the landscape.

You once wanted to be famous,
before you were broken, shard by shard, eroded
until only the shining shell, that brittle shell
was left, and easy target, easily shattered.

Easily shattered and painstakingly put back together.
Forget fame. Forget the stars, you are content now
just to be alive, a man with roots who travels,
more content to listen than talk, finally aware

other people’s stories matter more than your own,
a container for others’ pain and sadness and salacious tales.
You have become the keeper of secrets,

sipping coffee here at the edge of the Northern Sea,
happiest when alone with the woman you love,
sipping coffee and holding her hand across the table,
watching, always watching, for the next story.

No longer the guardian.
No longer the hero.
Simply a soldier, a pawn in the battle,
unnoticed, fighting your own small battles,
your shield and skin and soul marked,
somehow still standing,
somehow able to wake in the new morning,
stand, and prepare for battle one more time.

There are no victories,
only the tide of war, the ebb and flow.
and a determination not to drown
in your own blood,
sure now, after a decade and more,
that you will not die of your wounds.

Even the broken
have power.
It is all a matter of how, or if
you choose to wield it.