motionless, like an addict turning away from the world of things towards whatever's left away from these nine bodies found dead in a filthy room away from this nine month-old baby raped and left in the woods at what point do you give up on anger as a weapon? how many years do you waste believing in meaningless acts of atonement? think about it this road that i live on goes nowhere this town that i've ended up in is as meaningless as yours and should we put x's on the doors of the houses where children have disappeared? should we dig for bones in the empty fields to the north? listen i no longer see silence as surrender i've come too far into the 21st century to give up on the idea of money as salvation i need shelter i need food need a job and then a way to get there someone to watch my kids and it's true that they never asked to know me and it's true that i owe them everything it's true that the air has been poisoned that the cuyahoga has caught fire and it rains on a saturday afternoon as i stand in the driveway replacing the brake lights on april's car it rains on a saturday evening as i put new locks on the back door as a woman two blocks away is thrown from a moving truck by her lover lives but loses the child loses the child but begs for forgiveness crawls back home with her frightened tears and her meaningless blood promises to try harder edvard munch, always and everywhere you tell the story about the horse dead in the road but it has no real ending you talk about the babies you lost words to help keep the sun in the sky and the children asleep and when i tell you that my stitches hurt you bring me my pills when the car refuses to start you begin to cry no other sound around us but the ticking of clocks tracy street poem yourself with nowhere to go with rain and with crooked doors and with broken windows the awkward smiles of ghosts the empty rooms too long now since i've felt your touch and too long since the sun had any warmth too many years of television and too many stories of bukowski's death useless noise and empty screams and ten million dogs choking on mouthfuls of shit your father staring at the dirty grey walls that have come to define his life your mother who refuses to talk about him who doesn't want to hear about the way he smiled as he backed you into the corner and i forget which of us saved the other but i remember the feeling of drowning i remember watching the footage of the bombs going off in madrid the bodies torn apart and the blood staining everything and the claim that all acts are acts of god and the girl was fifteen and she said she was running away and then she was sixteen and pregnant the ocean was blue but too cold to swim in the plane went down and then the body of a newborn baby floated to the surface and i was listening to something by dylan tom thumb's blues maybe and the rain kept falling and i couldn't get warm i couldn't remember your face you were sitting right there Main Page This site sponsered by