Poem: "Debt"

Debt

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedShadows have worn the pavement down
like wind and rain
in the parking lot of a gas station
in the town where I was born.

Where the birds flit fitful
in skeletal grasses, dirty
and desperate, clinging
to an ounce of sky,

waiting to be counted by the radicals
camped out by the air compressor,
which never worked.

Their debts are sacred,
the source of new life.
Their paper masks fashioned
from old lottery tickets
with feathers glued
to the orbitals.

Nobody ever goes inside.
It's stacks of mail
from floor to ceiling,
nature's pulse in the machine.

And anyway, even out here,
there's only room to stand.

What isn't touched
by what we owe one another?

Shadows
lengthen.

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