don’t get me wrong
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poem
22 Articles
AT LONG LAST from John Hicks on Vimeo.
sometimes I want to flee
the concrete land they made for me
through the weed grown ditch
the overgrown ravine
into a jungle
with mountains on the other side
where men with no uniforms
want to kill me with sticks and stones
sometimes I feel like the glorious history of civilization
could just evaporate
like a puddle on a hot summer day
the day I can’t deliver
let the bookkeeper take me out back
before you were born
the years stretched into the past
it was a world without you
I take trash to the street
like shift change
can’t there be a sense of positivity
that’s not sold the way soap is sold?
they were doing nothing
they were sitting around
telling stories about the way the world is
and I could not argue
with the truth
of their sad conclusions
the wind in the trees puts me in a trance
again
in the backyard with a record player
a long orange extension cord
a rock star cellist from the 1940s
“What are you smiling at?”
the man with a bag of cans
snarls at me
as I swoop by on my bicycle
to the door
of the grocery store
why are you reading this
got to be something
you’ve got to do
yet here you are
frittering I’d say
these blank lines
on the notebook paper
make me bleak and uneasy
like the thought of a book
no one will ever read
in the far corner of an empty library