When the Only Thing Up Ahead is Winter and it is Long

A steel air sweeps itself backwards. And like a barge that never ends, it will be winter in the meantime.

Like a yuppie I jog. And I seem to be the only one doing so, at least on this Cleveland street. Granted, it is a street that has seen better days, and the way it’s uncared for reminds all of us that what it was it isn’t now. As years back, it was a growth out west—a building from behind of already too much congestion, then onto a lessening, and then finally: a frontier. And in the eyes of those turned with it there lay promise—screaming like a jewel in a rock.

But it’s already modernity now, bunch, which is to say we’ve been lapped, as every inch of our mainland is re-circulated by the waste of pushing time. And we the people are unhealthy, directionless.

Everyone around me is without thrill and moves into the wind. A man, a fat man with long shorts outside of fat legs is layered with a bunch of things that uninspire: his fatness, his mumbles, the way his black hair in his hood lingers unflappable as it sticks in its own oil, he disappoints, growing instead out of the street and back into its dominating incitements like a fountain of unusable grease. Farewell to the boy inside of me he says by just moving minus any ease at all.

Passed him and all up the sidewalks, the buildings are bent and miss shingles like teeth. The lots in front of them are absent yet filled with unintended consequences as x-rays are of broken bones. The asphalt is chunky. Garbage runs victory laps with the strewing wind it gets kicked by. And the guardrails that bound slope pitifully in crunches like the after effects of evaporating wealth and goodwill.

And all these folks while praying are torn to incomprehension by the audacity of braving it. So all is not lost then, perhaps.

Further on, two dykes wait for the bus. They too are fatter—their bodies nuggets of dump, which is to say real, substantiated, and not in the least sublime. Unlike the layered fat man, however, they look a bit more correct, well at the very least: as expected, if only because they’re butch and people are supposing a tug of things beefy. But it’s not just that. Because they’re whole dyadic being is a chip off a city that breaks down before returning out of them, this mirroring noticeable from their flannels and sweats right on up to the way they kiss as the bus moves near—it is a thick, doubtless kind of endearing. Perhaps not unlike meatloaves colliding. At any rate, it is a Cleveland love story, no doubt. And what they may lose in aesthetic they make up for in dispirited inspiration—as even this setting of rust, winter, and shadows can’t stop the yearn for digging in to find what has purposely been surrounded by.

Besides, you can’t blame the bodies for taking on the course of its climate. I mean, in Africa it’s the same way, except there people are bones since there’s nothing to protect them anyway. At least here we’ve had promises, chances—a decent way at a better life. Yet lately it feels like we have built upon our footprints one too many times; growing, ironically then, at the expense of whole regions. Meanwhile, the poured concrete fucks itself in the end—to bury the love in all of the cities as our hope sits tied to some long, arriving cold.

And I jog, thinner. Fighting to try in order to keep fit, as I am less a protector of whatever scraps of human we have left than a bleeder intending to tear and spread the good of myself out. Yet it often seems to never matter given that so much otherness dominates the tiny of our bodies—thus making it so hard to do the right thing by others and ourselves. And so here I am, again, with them and facing the wind. And it’s just the end of fall. And no matter where I turn to run to, it continues, surrounding us in every direction.