Crossroad

I walked there almost every day when the morning was returning to the air.
This cast out bit of farmland that hadn’t yielded anything in generations.
There was a bird nest there that I liked to check up on from a distance
and make sure the mourning mother didn’t need me as a savior from a storm.
She made their nest in the wheel well of an overgrown old truck that had weeds
which looked like monsters the longer you stared.

The inside of the old barn had its rotting walls painted like the cover of a storybook
and I stood there in its darkness and with all the time I took
I could have carved it all by memory with my hand.
Beneath the floorboards one time when I was out there in the rain I felt insane
when I was ripping them apart, but after I had a few of them clear, I found a covered case with a guitar.
I tuned it right there on my knee by ear until the sound was something I could stand to hear.
I took it home and stored it in the corner of my room where I watched it fade as I would fall asleep.

I wore it on my back when I made my daily rounds but didn’t play it besides a couple chords I knew.
The day came when the doves had grown too big to just remain and so they took off and abandoned me
to a life left all alone and on the ground. I needed to hear any sound
to keep my mind away from all my fears. So I laid my fingers on the strings, but before I played a note it disappeared.
A figure with a hood around its face, I couldn’t see, appeared with the guitar a few feet away from me.
It told me where I stood was at crossroads long before, and if I pledged my only soul to him
his word could make me something that would hang on to this world just like a dress hangs
from the shoulders of a girl.