I’ve been waiting for someone to crack my head open,
Spilling all of its contents across the pavement
Like a bleeding Sunday morning yolk.
Please transform me into a shell of my former self
So I can be trapped in a perpetual state of nostalgia.
Tales of another man shall echo through the northeast corridor,
All the way out into the faraway mountains of Northern Jersey,
Where people will mistake these stories for some newly unearthed prophecy.
You and your sterilized eyes and mind
Shall become consumed in the ecstasy of better days,
When we’d sit dazed and stupefied, catching solar flares with our retinas
Waiting to see which one of us would blink first.
The opalescent nature of our sundown conversations
Will forever be memorialized in all those photographs we forgot to take.
I guess those moments shall become rumors too,
Known to be true by no one aside from you & I.
We were bound & blinded by our desire for unrestricted flight
Away from this city whose burned down buildings only made us colder,
Shuttering as life’s cruel sense of humor flew way over our heads.
There was so much suffering brooding from the dim-lit doorways,
Men & women tossing around on newspaper beds, searching for inked stained comfort.
Some of them must’ve come from the corners of the country,
Hoping that life here would be better than out west.
The coasts will always serve as polar opposites to each other,
With the same ol’ chaos lurking beneath the skin deep change of scenery.
The journey is the closest we can come to disconnection,
Placing ourselves in an environment completely alien.
Yet, no matter how far we run, we’re surrounded by oceans,
Nature’s barrier between us and our wildest imagination.
Across the waves lie unspoken taboos, ritual serving to further misguide us
From that sense of understanding we’ve pieced together,
Like a quilt of singed fabrics, with each thread serving as a reminder
To a part of life we wish to be left behind.
What are we now but disheveled casts of our former selves?
We let the struggle get the best of us
And now we climb alongside Sisyphus,
Helping him push the boulder to the top
Convinced that it takes two sets of hands
To conquer our man-made concept of death.
