Suburbia Poem by Derek Keck

Black-night fighters of the sky
and cities burning metaphorically.

This is Dresden circa now.
(The dead remain unspoken for.
And will continue to be unspoken for.)

I no longer dream about my youth or the dead.
They are dross and unrepresented.
The clogger of throats.

I give up on me.
I give up on you.

I am an idea on fire.
I am the space between the axe and the wood.
I make parasite day-dreams.
I am lighting a cigarette and walking home.

All around me the trees dance.
They look like the hands of the dead
reaching, crawling, trying to grab God
from Heaven and bring him down to Earth
with the rest of us.

The wind is moving, but I never see it move.
It haunts with oppression.
It haunts Hell.
It sounds like the greatest symphony ever writ.
It sounds like Odysseus tied to a mast.
It sounds like me lighting a cigarette.

It sounds like everyone, but we're inadequate to it.
So is God.

To think, a part of creation better than the creator.
I laugh at this because I am absurd, and

even though words convey abstract thoughts and past and future,
it also conveys

nothing.

I light another cigarette and wrap my coat around me.
The concrete looks like the grave of the nineteen-fifties.

I watch the ghost of Beaver Cleaver ride by.

I heard his father was cheating with the neighbor woman.
I heard his mother mixed sleeping pills and vodka.
I heard life ends.

My heart is breaking,
because it had nothing else to do.

A dog barks on a chain and wakes me from this meditation,
like death would.

I go to light another cigarette,
but the wind blows out the match.

The last match.
The last flame.

I am alone on Mars.
I am lonely.
Life seems to be ending.

My soul has grown deep
like the asphalt.