Where I live

Here's a piece that I've been spending some time on recently. It seems to work better in my head as a spoken piece, which is where I've been struggling with it lately. I can't decide exactly how to express the inflection that I hear in my head as I recite the words. I also still hate half the words, I really like the other half of them. Being that as it is I doubt that it's actually done, they never are, but I'll put it up here for what it's worth...

Where I live

I want to tell you about where I live.

Encircled by steel rails and encased in concrete,

it’s rather nice mind you.

The people are friendly.

Dogs hide like rats behind the sheetrock,

if you listen carefully between the smell of freshly baked bread and the city skyline

you’ll feel the the person that you used to be slowly creeping out the back of your spine

and you’ll just watch with wonder and amazement

as that part of yourself distorts

mutates

before your very eyes.

The people aren’t really friendly.

Right now I can hear moaning from the other room

what the walls might muffle is only echoed upon the cathedral pitch

lightly refracted through loose ceiling tiles

I’m not even sure who’s moaning.

It doesn’t matter, at some point we all moan.

We moan because of pleasure.

We moan because of pain.

We moan because 20 years ago, she told us that we weren’t who she wanted us to be.

And now we moan with laughter at how silly it is,

that we give people that much control over us.

But this isn’t about me,

it’s about where I live.

Because, between the longshoremen and the hills

there is no concept of right and wrong,

truth and falsity,

morality and sin.

There are no sins here,

just mistakes that are long forgotten

and mistakes we still hold dear

like some kind of poison for which an antidote never existed

or maybe it did exist

but only after we became so far removed from the disease it’s become irrelevant

and by some twisted fate of the infection,

so have we.

But this is supposed to be about where I live.

Where at 3 o’clock in the morning the walls tremble

from the locomotive outside the door

and no one wakes up.

Sometimes people stay the night,

too drunk to drive home,

but not drunk enough to sleep in my bed,

and mention how it wakes them up.

I usually chuckle,

call them soft,

then ask how it feels to live in a normal house?

On a street with sidewalks,

with neighbors.

Where people have fences that aren’t crowned with barbed wire.

And a friendly conversation isn’t

“dude you come by here every single day, cracked out of your mind,

asking for cigarettes, I haven’t given you one before,

why would I give you one now?”

And then for some reason I can’t explain

and have no control over

I give him a cigarette

and tell him to fuck off.

I guess we’re friendly in our own way.