Sunday, March 23, 2008

A POEM - WHAT WAS IT THAT CALLED TO YOU IN THE DARK?

WHAT WAS IT THAT CALLED TO YOU IN THE DARK?
It was easy enough to sit there in the dark,
Nipping at beers,
Smoking cigarettes out of boredom,
Faintly hoping the smoke might keep
The malarial mosquitoes away.
Easy enough to just sit there,
Listening to the final rains of the monsoon,
Tapping on the corrugated metal roof above your head.
It was easy enough,
But it was also goddamned hard.
It was hard to sit there,
Thousands of miles from anyplace you might call home,
Thousands of miles away from anybody
who knew your real name,
because you’d been using fake ones for months.
It was hard knowing the world was outside,
Spinning madly around and around,
That life was out there just passing you by,
Always passing by.
There was something about it that irritated you,
Something that got deeper under your skin,
Than the mosquito bites and the bed bugs.
There was something out there that was calling to you,
Just barely whispering,
But you couldn’t ever figure out what the hell it was.
It was some invisible force consuming your brain,
Bullying your mind into a corner,
Back into the wilderness of thought.

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