Poetry grows where the soil is rich.
I rarely went outside to play;
even outside is a place not grown but built,
trees planned and planted, uprooted when
they uproot sidewalks. A place that goes out
dressed as other places and rarely seen as home.
A place few stay in and then mostly for the people
not the place. A place that’s neither hot nor cold,
but lukewarm and dampened by spitting rain.
A place that often feels like a place hurrying on 
to be somewhere else, and its own story would only
be so much excess baggage. A place designed
and redesigned with changing fashions,
unrooted in the earth and soon—so they’ve 
predicted now for years—the earth will shake it off.
And I wonder: how does poetry still grow in no place
the way moss bleeds from cracks in the sidewalk?

Nov 19, 2021