Notes From The Overground

Stricken, caustic city rained on & rotted insides as overnight in Dallas became horizons & light
And you were so beautiful in the haze & disaster of the evening slumped on your suitcase
Sniffing the air & shuffling your feet as your muscles flexed & blended
Dallas is a disaster in the hopeless middle of the country, hollow God figurines
And white-out hot light slither of another calloused country evening down home
Him as a country cowboy, leather boots suffocating his ankles & hat crisp in the air
Cutting through the summer light-dark of a Texas evening to his pickup truck
Bet the over under on the bar down on the corner that serves beer-only, fuck wine & fuck anything
That doesn’t walk two-step locked with the pound of the pavement & the stretch of his reflex
You can tell a Dallas girl from the push of her hair & the pull of her twang
Making country music write sad songs about hard love, good death & fast trucks
Always missing someone or missing out on something & could you ever find it
Out here with only three cities connecting the state, if you were to bisect Texas we’d be tilting left & right
And you can tell a Texas man by his love of everything twice as much
72 oz. steak consuming & the Stetson cologne caking against its lid in the bathroom
Next to the photo of your Mom & Dad holding hands at the high school prom
Destined to be looked at behind glass like a picture zoo stared at to be frozen
You gave us the sickness & our country has come down with it, still under the weather
Serpentine in our throats & a mess of what ifs & have nots
Cities decimated by hopelessness baked away under the red light of fake heat
You generate heat like false hope & I looked out on your city & bled
Crying for dying dreams & kids waking up in the middle of the night motherless & alone
And crying for dying soldiers who would come home anyway to their baby girl & her new father
Fractured halves & thirds of a state, former territory now forcing its mark
You can tell a Texas kid from the way they speak, imperfect A’s & Morse code R’s dropped
Into their parent’s casual conversation about God, Guns & Family
Well there is no nuclear family out here in the middle, no getting out of town
No other freeways driving across endless zero or countryside broken up by
The up down pumping of oil rigs forcing their thick black sludge into the souls
Breaking up the horizon of power lines building themselves before your eyes
Making your future right across the 427 miles laying themselves out before you
Harsh desolation of a slipping feeling faultless America anchored by Dallas & ex-urbs
Mini-malls playing major chords in the cattle call of endless WalMart visits with the family
With your step-down drawl you’re a dead giveaway, forced to die right here in Texas
Odd & awful in that different way you put on your boots before your shirt
And splash water on your face after shaving & ask for a place to hang your hat
I saw eyes just like this lost in an ocean without water but stern, directed, forceful
Looking into fragments of conversation as I drift off into the lessons of jet engines
Leaving Dallas just a city on a map of the country & a people happy with being the same something
In an everything else better off at being flyover top then hot under
© Adam Bresson

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