Exile

I figured I’d get up early
and get a little bit ahead
of where I thought I’d be.
Feeling for shells with my feet
in the waist deep water
that is moving independently.
The crows showed me
what it looked like in the sky
before it cried across
the city and filled up the open
potholes like the street
had somehow found a way to heal.
Empty high school gymnasiums
had those banners on their walls
just to commemorate the teams
no one remembered.
All those Decembers when the world
became a snow globe filled with shopping malls
and all those creepy dolls would watch us
through the plastic.
A good street hockey game always ended
with some blood staining the concrete,
and a few dragonflies out in the weeds
all surrounding the puck.
There was a catalog of action figures,
after they had been run over by lawn mowers,
on the back of the toilet like it was waiting
there to bite whoever entered.
The best page was just a wide shot
of an entire battalion of army men
melted into an amorphous pile
of green sludge with bits of human
in there somewhere.
I walked through town with my hands
in my pockets and remembered when
I passed that way with you.
You probably don’t remember it
since it wasn’t that eventful,
but when we walked through here
we saw a deer, so far off from the forest,
it must have thought that it had
fallen off the planet.