DAY 8: Driving/ Not Paying Attention

Well here ia an idea that came to me while driving. It is a new post though nothing to write hoem about. Day 8 down.




I want to tell him it's too late.
That steel plus neglect always equals
screwed to the power of slow decay.

But these are not things you say to someone suspended
fifty feet in the air,
working nights,
pissed off,
with a welder.

But he knows better than anyone
that once water slips like a lover
beneath the sheets of paint
that you either catch the symptoms
or begin the process of deconstruction.

But this overpass has been forgotten
patches of brown flakes
creep up the side like industrial ivy
and these men are asked to revive this city like
some secret garden.

But in the tending of
sparks and flakes
they are sowing
splinters of metal that move when you press them
even years after the restoration.

Their fathers planted
marigolds of sickness in their lungs
through years of
sucking in the pollen of their livelihood.

But some circumstances only allow so much growth.

So sons of blue color grow to
fill the same gaps in the latticework of
Baltimore that their fathers did.
Once this life slips like water into your lungs
You begin the slow drown of blue collar.

Each night as his wife winces
in the dark at the touch of his hands
from the roughness of his neglect,
he wishes that he could turn fingertips like
briars back into
thick mounds of tilled soil.

it's too late
but he already knows that.