Leaving, Summer, 1998

Let's Start with How it Felt:
I remember it as a parade of men leaving the city limits for better climes. A smile on their faces and a lit cigarette for each of the loved ones they are leaving behind. It's like a black cloud carnival of aching limbs and crooked teeth, the feeling of parting is rocking in their heads and creaking like old door hinges. On the horizon there is a vibrating sun, casting mile long shadows that encroach the powder of soil. In the city of ghosts the people look on, chastising hollow figures with careful eyes that stare a hole. In the end, from the city, the parade is an ever shrinking blip on the eternal curve of the widests of plains. If this place in my head was a desert then the scorch of the sun would have burned through the rememberance of how it was to feel departed. But the rays are a radio, and I am the wavelength that they are always tuned to.