I can still remember when The City was new.
Everything sparkled clean back then—even me. Because I was stubbornly trying to make healthier choices in those days for the sake of a surrogate family to which I was never actually entitled.
But I still tried to hold on to them all the same.
There was a certain magic attached to all the strange street signs. The green ones hanging higher than I ever was. Fresh adventures sparked with every GPS guided misturn. Enticing surprises lurked around every quirky neighborhood’s twisted corner.
You just had to be brave enough to actually make that fucking turn.
Everything now is just stagnant; everything now just smells like decay. You can literally smell the city dying. When the wind off the river comes at you just right. Usually in those nebulous dirtbag hours when you haven’t yet drunk yourself into a stupor deep enough to actually sleep.
Because you know instinctually that inertia is just another kind of cancer. As is predictability. And those damaging poisons seem to infect everything these days.
So it’s better to keep fucking moving.
Because it’s always the same patterns. With the same cookiecutter players. The same skeletal street creatures out begging for their existence; the same broken caricatures standing with their hands out on the same street corners.
Not even their scrawled cardboard signs ever change.
I know—because I’ve read them all.
And I once gave away to a member of that homeless tribe a golden ring meant for another lie life.
So I am left alone to live to fullest the life I was left. Even though the dangers of fighting all the airplanes has become just another kind of routine, too.
That unwinnable battle against winged tin monsters fought on a battlefield stage of bitchy 517 weather. That screaming, spooling madness taxiing up on its nightly invasion of a consumer driven insanity.
We like to lie to ourselves; we like to say that we are maybe helping save someone’s life by efficiently pushing out tons of critical healthcare crap. But all we are really doing is working our asses off, and risking our lives, just to help make some rich fucker even more rich.
I am damn good at my job. And my hoodrat Gateway Gangsters almost always somehow get it done. Even though we never get to share in the bigger paydays.
Usually the only compensation I receive is another cold shoulder shrugged at closing time. After another couple of rounds have been ordered for this dog heading back out the road. Because by then, I’ve had my fill of drinking with intimate strangers. And it’s time to take the embarrassment of my medicine in private.
Because Michigan is out there waiting.
Even though I am no longer seduced by the sirens of her songs.
That lullaby symphony ended years ago. Back on a terrible meadow walk day when all the dreams somehow died amongst all the goldenrod.
My feet know they need new ground underneath them; my lungs itch for the clean refreshment of better environments.
Foxes are forever burdened with the curse of having to make their own luck.
The stars were never once on my side.
Where will I ever find my light?
