It’s a striving world, this thing is,

A place of pushing and pulling,

A get outta my way place,

An I’m right, you’re wrong place

That leaves us yelling from across the road

Like a couple of squabbling chickens.

It’s a burning place, this thing,

Tinder dry scorched souls

And everyone is carrying a torch.

It’s an earbud world, this noisy place

A jogging smart phone

random selected soundtrack world of internal sounds

where you have to unplug to be heard,

to ask what was that?

Because it is my voice, my aural shield, that matters.

A place cluttered with broken pieces

We left behind like a car with a smoking transmission

On a dark street at midnight.

Things we make someone else’s problem.

Childhoods, hearts, dreams,

Stuff we picked up, rolled around and crumbled

And left scattered on some trail as if we were coming back

With a pot of glue to fix it.

As if you’d be waiting.

As if I could walk up, sit down and say, Hey, sweetheart, how the hell are ya?

As if it would start again where it left off.

Mid-sentence.

Wordless wondering incomplete

With sad eyes and small tears

With a hollowness that ever echoes

With a basket of loneliness strapped like a gunnysack

That I asked you to fill.