These Sidewalks Are Suicide, a poem

Even water can feel like flames

within your lungs.

Storm stifles on the fly.

It suffocates the turf that kept us dry,

and free from the birds.

We’ll climb toward their beaks,

but it gets worse!

Because these damn sidewalks are suicide

when the people

they walk

in stride

in stride.

Even the sun knows all the shit I’m in.

Its rays will warm the ground and dry my skin.

I cannot crawl,

though I’ve tried!

My body’s fried onto the blacktop.

And them,

with their massive machines used for grinding below,
only by their unfortunate attitudes
will they look down and see our own,
and only by that extreme rare chance

will they be charitable enough
to ignore our hideous exterior
and lift us from this inevitable death
and the hopelessness of breathlessly crawling along the bottom of an endless flood.

Because even the sidewalks are suicide

when the people

they walk

in stride

in stride.

For fortune is to be simply tossed back into the grass,
where earthworms have a chance to survive the rain.

Song Version
(written by me, performed with Brian Wood and Scott Weber)

oxyborb · These Sidewalks are Suicide