The City In Which She Sleeps: Lubbock #1

All this traveling has made me nostalgic, yearning for a time that perhaps never even existed, and as proof I submit my exhausting pop poetry…

City lights, like shards of broken
glass, break against the night under
which you sleep

City lights, a thousand eager
eyes, see the secrets from you I
wish to keep

City lights, cold as the gravediggers
back, pierce the charcoal canvas in
silhouetted steeple

City lights, fiercely remind me to
forget, and recoil to my
hollow cathedral

**

A wave of panic explodes with twisted tsunami force when I realize that my plane ticket has me seated in economy class and the dignified faces (all with good bone structure) of first class passengers offer consoling glares that seem to say, “Perhaps if you had worked just a little bit harder” as I walk towards the back, towards defeat, towards airline abyss. Perpetual simmer has reached full boil by the time I reach the 27th row and hot tears burn against my cold face.

One little dark secret of the airline industry is that your odds of survival in a crash decrease dramatically the farther back you sit. This thought does not help matters much.

Six hundred miles later I’m in Lubbock with nothing but time on my hands, not even sure what I’m doing here. Operating on two hours of sleep and afraid to nap for fear of missing the start of game three, I wander around the hotel, inspecting the lobby, the kitchenette, the pool. I’ve done “my rounds”, as I like to call them, six times in the past hour. Each time I return to the area my breath holds in anticipation, my soul bursting at the thought that something might be different. A child runs through the lobby and I decide to call her a ghost; a door slams near the pool area and I quickly turn but see no one; a clock ticks on a red wall above my head and I hear my life moving forward, racing even, charging full steam ahead towards… not much.

Welcome to Lubbock.