Poetry

 took the 56 bus downtown 
to a place once real, 
or at least in imagination. 
The flat windows and cold steel 
that scraped against the winter sky 
felt like human parking lots 
hanging over the abandoned shoulders 
of people running back and forth, 
while the homeless sold newspapers 
no one cared enough to read. 
A city lived only in imaginations 
by people without imaginations. 

I talked to old friends along a dirty river 
about nothing about a reoccurring past, 
their names slowly forgotten, names whitewashed 
into a tapestry of post-industrial bliss. 
I followed an address to my childhood: 
an empty void with escaping memories 
blowing in the lake effect wind. 

And when I awoke 
I walked forward... because 
there was no where else to go; 
tears were not worth the trouble.