The Urge Within

A train travels through an endless Midwestern cornfield,
yellow slants to gold as the sun leans heavy on the horizon.
Nostalgia is a better name for this mendacious embroidery
this meager harvest of memory and hope –
Even the entropy of a coffee cup half spilling into spent crumbs
cannot resist this pastel wash of half-truths.
A sweet decline. To have spent one’s life thinking
I am the good one, the stable one, and the sustainer of love.
And one morning in a city between the city you call home
and the city you are traveling to, you accept you are migrant.
This is where the prodigal finds himself, in the middle of his life,
somewhere between coercion and an insubstantial desire,
the slow decomposition that is life. Yet for now this half-light,
the gentle sway of the tracks: music enough
for this journey, real and imagined.