Dream Music On A Cold Dark Afternoon Poem by David Kowalczyk

We all dream of
what we are not.


Buffalo dreams of being
a gracefully aging geisha
dancing for a samurai lover.


A city once a volcano
erupting with wealth and culture
was catapaulted into the abyss
with the dawn of the Information Age.


Buffalo is now made of rust and
spider webs, of gently festering
purgatory gray days,
of the slow whistling of ghosts.


There is no now now
in Buffalo.


There, history is written by assassins.
The past is always watching.
The past is not a shadow, but a mountain.


The ache of history makes everything
heavy and slow.
Nostalgia is the secular religion,
memories the only prizes awarded
for atrophied lives.