project/city

A Poem by alan khan

I

We've no prairies nor fields, nor heavens to speak of...

no kindred spirits sharing ancient secrets.

we've only stripped down wagons, from wars long passed.

the unbalancing loom of fear and ignorance hanging in the air, choking our tears.

we've no rolling hills of green, nor childhood, nor gentle innocence..

no gleefully filled stomachs.

we've only the robbing and misplacement of time, the stench of bodies rotting lingering in the wind.

mothers void of passion and love. fathers with only their violent presence.

tragedy and loss uncomfortably pushed into the common place.

locked away from normalcy
an actual life a heavy mystery.
this place an unnatural history
for people trapped in it's complexity.

II

It holds it binds
it refuses to set free.
it promotes and encourages dreaming
of what could or could not be.

famine and poverty strike terror
and paranoia in the natives.
reaching the peak of 100 years
to learn of an entire life wasted.

if you leave it follows
like the wolf with it's hungry display.
just when you've put it to the rest the night before
it returns furiously the next day.

the dreamers and the sandmen
both products of the city's sin.
feel the same sickness at their core
but mask it with their poisonous grin.

the only answer is flames
burn this iced hell to the ground.
leave it all left in ruins
rid its streets of its mournful sound.

caught in the inferno
our skin now masked with burns.
"this place comes from within us now.."
this frightening truth we finally learn.

and so we are outcasts
free to travel no where else..
we're doomed into non empathy
regardless of love illusion or wealth.

we have been cursed by the disease native only to the project we were thrown into at birth.