Wherever We Go

There are cracks in the road that no one will fill. There are leaves fallen over, spotted and translucent. Your skin breathes just as loud as the lungs we’ve buried. We’ve lost our greenhouses.

Train tracks trail behind the pollution, increasing again, without your permission.

Cathartic for one week. Chaos for 6 years. Crime rates grow faster than the recovered and the dead.

Our frailty is so obvious now. Raise those borders. De-globalize. Trust only ourselves. Close the countries. End the transport of goods. Trust only our own production of disease and pain. Because what we make will never be as bad as what others can do to us. Because we are more than them. Because we will fault everyone except us. We were only scared once our birds fell out of the sky. Once the tingle was felt in our own throats. Once fear was only me and you. Because those people I never see don’t matter, they won’t reach us here. Where these mouths fall are uncertain. Something slimy stirs, swirls, slinks along our legs. High pitched sounds fall from our high rise buildings. The applause ends.

Shoes litter the sidewalks. Single file line grave markers. Candles are never lit. These funerals all gathered into one day would require forest fires to commemorate them. Burn our buildings, rid us of this collective memory.

Underneath bridges we have homes. They grow into their own little cities.

Grandiose stories for our grandchildren. Because we were never able to be grandchildren ourselves.

How will these shoes ever fit my feet again? Will these pants wrap around this waist again?

They won’t reach us here.

Bundled onto roads, no pockets to hold onto anything. The sky is so clean today. We’ve never seen the sun without its struggle against the dark smoke of pollution.