Where you live there are worse things
Than crumbling sidewalks, worse than trailer parks
Where lawns turn yellow-brown,
Where fading flowers tremble in poverty,
Unable to camouflage their roots;
Where violets speak silently, deafeningly,
Petals paling, turning rusty at the edges,
Blooms twisting towards the sun,
Struggling just to be.
Don’t look.
Forget.
Keep walking.
You turn your back on them like you turn the channel
When the TV shows pictures of starving children, videos of
plane crashes,
Lootings and shootings and bombs disintegrating families;
Just part of the landscape where you turn a deaf ear
To the muffled shouts and raging songs of breaking glass
From the neighbors next-door—the ones who deal.
Just like TV and radio, it isn’t real,
Has nothing to do with you.
Turn it off; turn your iPod up.
Don’t look.
Head down.
Keep walking.
You can study those cracks in the sidewalk,
Look for the pattern, the meaning,
Try to understand all the broken, unpredictable sameness
That is everywhere, inescapable.
You can think tomorrow you’ll walk a better path,
But you turn this same corner everyday
And wonder if such a thing is even possible.
Don’t look.
Don’t think.
Keep walking.
Better to imagine nothing.
Safer. Easier.
Eventually you’ll become immune to the familiar.
Then violets will stop speaking to you
And you’ll stop seeing them if you just stop seeing...
If you turn away for long enough.
