Empty Streets

Feel the movement of this idle town. Slow, deliberate, monotonous.

Finite options, infinite memories flooding back upon return.

Fluorescent tears about all of those lonely years.

Spent longing to escape and remake yourself.

Lost love letters which you are better off not finding.

And notes about what you hate most about your evolving figure addressed to yourself.

Burnt skin in this desert-like air that coats your nostrils with the smells of manure.

Poolside sadness pools in your stomach.

Suburban nightmares drift and settle into your being and emerge into your reality.

You attempt to hold onto any sense of contentedness.

Only to confront the fear that the years will begin to pile on, and you will still be here.

Small towns aren’t always a sentence of eternal immobility.

But you need more time to grow.

Wounds from a childhood too recent to allow returning to feel like anything but

suffocating.