If I had lived 100 years ago,
I would have been dead in 10;
Plucked away to fight in some
foreign war in a land that,
if people squinted at me to
blur the colors in my face,
they would swear was my own,
or perhaps eaten away from
the inside by disease that
festered beneath the glowing
lights of modern cities.
But I don’t live 100 years ago,
I live now in a time that is
marked by an undulating world;
a world that I rarely see despite
being so “worldly” as to have
traveled beyond the imagined
borders of where I was born.
I sit in my apartment and
exist unremarkably– surrounded
in a prison of faded roses
on brown wallpaper, as if
the vines died first and left
the roses only slightly withered.
I hear the echoes in my mind,
the echoes that remind me of
just how empty things are
not only without but within.
I wear my unpressed slacks
with unclean shirts and
hastily tied ties before scuttling
out the door in torn boots
sewed up like the crown
of Frankenstein’s monster.
Soon I will leave this place,
this bizarre world I have
called me home for such a
brief blink of reality, this
place where I never speak
and am seldom spoken to,
where I find and lose purpose
more often than most
lose their keys, where
everything you think about
becomes juxtaposed with
something you never imagined.
A snowy realm of confused
symbols and spit-laden walks,
of strong horsemen and
women impervious to the cold,
blue skies and a sun that
never quite reaches its apex,
of Russian letters that
no Russian learns or speaks,
tents and bricks and wooden shacks.
The echoes go on forever,
heard by the birds and the dogs,
the wolves lurking in the trees
of the north and the camels
in the south, until dust storms
dull the vibrations and sink
your memories, your city,
and everything else into
a temporary oblivion.
The echoes you hear within
that soar from you without.
Composed 01/26/14
Author’s Note: Well, here I am. 27 years old and writing poems about the impending end of my Peace Corps service.
Two Second Street 