California Escape

I was stuck in the limbo that is the litany of slums in suburban California;

In the eyes of wretched dry dwellers living in the arid dreams of a one day arrival of water.

The town of two hundred thousand trapped by unseen forces

tasked with too much time and not enough tasks to perform;

Scrunched down to feeling like few, with the large city fit inside a small town ambiance.

They wash their calloused hands, their imperfect faces, their laboured souls, but

They can not tell that they died the day they decided to settle down there.

Now they mourn for their long lost lives with golf club swings and swigs of alcohol.

They howl into the abyss like banshees,

With small town drama that doesn’t stretch as far as the city lights do.

To smoke, to bleed, to wish, is to know the air, the heat, and the emptiness;

To act, to escape, to revel being away is to know the feeling of freedom.