Poem: This is How It Used To Be

This is how it used to be,
torn jeans, slouching,
sixteen beers in me,
vomiting greasy slang
that we developed along
our path to alchohol-laden nihilism.
We worked for the Man
and knew it, “slaves” we said
to ourselves at the end of the day,
thinking how come we
didn’t get a piece of
the fucking pie.
Or maybe we did, but
it was rotten, and tasted like Cleveland.
And when the bars closed
we paraded like sleepwalkers
with blood on our ankles
amid factories, empty ones,
like graveyards.
And when I return
to see my city, it seems
everything’s changed.
My friends are far from one another,
stuck between the ground
and the gutter; paler, thinner,
older. We’re all growing
millions of miles apart.
But it wasn’t always like this,
life was supposed to go forever,
not faster into nowhere.
And those who still have
the sense of something divine
living in the gutter can
understand that something
somewhere went wrong.
The train derailed and
left us all stranded, with a
minimum wage job
and a floozy girlfriend.
Is this how it was supposed to be all along?
Maybe this is how it has always been
and always will be.

November 28, 2007