A Familiar Route

Chill days walking, the sound of

snow beneath these heavy boots,

assuring that, yes, these days

within a husk of humanity are

foolish and often wasted, and

that, yes, we do half as well

at everything, even with our

marvelous toys, as anything

truly built for this world might

with an unadorned paw or

claw or tentacle, as I see a

furry dog stealing quick

and silent across the snow,

never shivering from the

immobile, frigid air that

hangs across this dying

neighborhood, especially

at night when the sounds

of tractor trailers subsides.

And there is the flash of

big televisions painting the

windows of small, decrepit

houses, evidence of us in

retreat, moving from the body

to the mind and yet leaving

that mysterious thing we

think of as a soul somewhere

out of the equation, for even

those places where people go

to kneel are little more than

businesses now, little more than

franchises selling high-speed

redemption that hardly lasts long

enough to get you down the block

before all the unrelenting realities

return,

And there is the sudden sound of

a shotgun blast in an old, ramshackle

house everyone thought was vacant,

and maybe it is only my own imagination,

but it seems the drab curtains are now

more variegated in color, perhaps

decorated with high velocity spatters

of blood and intracranial fluid and bits

of bone as someone takes the quicker

routes into the arms of some maybe/maybe not

world to come,

And I do not look too long, and neighbor’s

doors are not flung open, and I do not

comment when I see a man standing

on the edge of the road later on with a

machete in his hand and a lost look

in his eye, but keep going, silent and

contained within myself, skimming

the bare surface of this place,

And the bare surface is where all the

corruption floats, and so I am gradually

sullied until little remains of what I

dreamed of when I was a boy, but only

these ghostly walkers in the chill,

remarkable for nothing, just another

vapor to rise into the hazed-over gloom

and be ignored.