SPOKANE FALLS
Home and tired,
I stepped out of time
and feel I've lost days.
Not so, just continuity.
The city in the dell,
built around a river falls
is dying a neglected decay,
it's pretty wartime architecture
and aged leafy lanes
have lost their life now,
like no one's home,
roads are rutted through,
lines faded on the thoroughfares,
boulevards are seedy.
Jesus Christ lives large here,
in tangled angered language,
the selected savior
of those desperate and isolated,
the dog hangs on
to the dry old bone,
so very hungry.
The righteous do no right here,
fiscal squalor, low-budget,
petty thief mentality,
the wages of scarcity dominate,
neighbors steal from each other
the spoils, spoiling,
a spinning have and have-not
dementia, us and them,
enemy mine behind locked doors,
lines drawn,
caricatures of each other
because of the blinds,
the narrow ledges of fear
make the citizens walk single file
against the wall on one side,
the abyss on the other,
and this way they are faceless
to each other,
the eyeless side of the head,
the dark side of the moon.
My family comes from this place,
both sides immigrants,
few remain,
the remaining unable to pull free the roots,
bitterly resigned to survive
the brackish condition,
not sea, not fresh,
not living, not dead,
but bitter, so bitter
of the newcomers,
those closed books who persist
with their native-sounding tongues
who come only to drain off
what isn't theirs,
they are not welcome,
not seen as human,
as the same,
suspected of evil
all that will not be known.
I'm sad of the wasting beauty,
splendor spiritless,
they say it reaches
all the way across
America, shaped like a bowl
and empty of its soup,
full of square TVs,
millions of square feet
of bargain basements and fast food,
nothing nourishing,
abundance upended, inverted,
debt.
I wonder that a curse unfolds,
the ghosts of genocides
return to haunt their houses,
the occupants cower
in their manifest destiny,
scared, so many shadows
it is dark inside,
aching from the weight
of all the guns,
the heavy metal,
the fumes of fear gag,
the roses no longer fragrant,
that is manufactured now,
bottled up and tagged,
had for a price, cheap
but no longer free.
I return from the valley
to my acre,
my oasis on the sea,
at the rim,
leave mother parting
with her gall bladder,
another ailing piece of herself
cut out, thrown away,
no longer heard from,
lived without, not whole,
grateful of my escape,
that I am not so pitted
that I can no longer touch,
I'm still among the living,
something of me
will perhaps survive this apocalypse,
as some of the first people have,
here and there,
blessed with some immunity,
a source artesian
this horse is just calm enough
to drink from.
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