Poem: "Romance of the Evening Lights in the Epicenter of Dying Industries" by Alan Lisanti

Romance of the Evening Lights in the Epicenter of Dying Industries
Alan Lisanti

I always dreamed I'd be anywhere but here
Birthed from small town idealism
But my blood whispers of where I'm supposed to be
Like my eyes used to paint portraits beyond the horizon line
Outside the confines of the vanishing point
Splatter colours on the still scene
A stillness so prevalent
When the steel bullet trains pass by incrementally
They disrupt and ignite the glorified fantasy
The way the water beneath the overpass seeped in rust and neon muds
Forever burned into my memory
Like it carried some significance still unbeknownst to me
In the moment speculation kept me occupied
And trickled into a long dry rotted stream of renewed hope
One day beyond all this well preserved worldly prison I shall venture like a lost dog beyond its unseen but overshadowing walls
One day I'll go farther than the transit trains into the future that still held promise before reality shattered it all
Really all this extra-curricular experimentation is just a placeholder for dreams too big to thrive in captivity
Limits are like tunnels sealed for our own protection where instead of greeting the light we fail in our best attempts to glide into collisions more gently before we high velocity kiss their cold walls
And spit shattered teeth fragments at dead air so humorous
Dead in our tracks and susceptible
Now to the false bliss of "no strangers here"
Drowned sorrows so cordially in the place
Where Everybody Knows Your Name
Warm ourselves upon the embers of familiarity
Stuff all the feel goods (albeit all temporary) into the voids that are digging their heels into our insides
Let the jukebox sing on this night for the so called normal ones
That same harsh caress of a terrible song
But watch close young confidant
Their smiles light up like pupils grow wide when face to face with the prospect of ugliness where one can still purge from despair its awkward appeal
I have seen so often how humans cower in the shadows of uncertainty
And they speak of curiosity like it's a synonym for recklessness
While I have wondered how compounding the risk can reap any rewards
Slowly I evolved into the statue I'm supposed to be
And hungered for motion on this checker board of forgetfulness
And contemplated dungeons with hidden secret doors
And I would crawl for decades that have felt like centuries across all the fractured skulls and assorted loose bones
I would reach a point where the center of my desire would become that moment where I sat inside myself on these tracks never too far from broken home
I would imagine the skeleton key to any lock would look a lot like my expression fifteen years ago
When all I had was the certainty of "somewhere out there"
And full circle on a whim I returned to it
Only to discover the magic had died
But somewhere inside me I knew
It still lingered there
Like a candle's wick on its last legs
Bleeding wax upon a monument
Time has a tendency to alter most forms
But the gypsy in me never made it with the vagabonds
And the dreamer in me never had the courtesy to relieve me from
The trance-like grip of desires too few could understand
Even through the turmoils let downs still so tumultuous
But never enough to knock me into surrender though
I've wasted so much time now
Going about this all wrong