Alone

In this town, the sun-bleached sidewalks are littered with clandestine cracks that, I swear, swallow people whole.
For as long as I can remember, the sky here has always been a dense gray, the industrial gray of stack pipes and metal on metal, of burning.
The sky isn’t scraped with tall windows framed in the angles and edges of concrete and steel.
Instead, deflated dreams hover like once-full helium balloons, forming a foggy stratus that folds itself into you like time.
Yesterdays are the gravity keeping my heavy feet planted on the ground, and I cannot stop.
These solitary feet never stop moving, not even for sleep; sleep is death’s dress rehearsal.
I move in a sleepwalker’s partial awareness, avoiding cracks in a never-ending search for something precise, something secure.
But, a sleepwalker’s course is anything but precise and secure; I have surrendered to Alone.
Alone is a lot like death.

-image via Pixabay by Leroy Skalstad