Half a mile from dawn, I walk along
the fence of the farthest corners

of Norfolk Southern railyard.
A quiet mockingbird on barbed wire.

Morning glory weaving around chainlinks
offers blue flowers to earlybird bees.

Tracks of abandonment
lay parallel like fingers of dry rivers.

A line of dirty silver cars, one painted
in red unartistic letters: I LIKE PAIN.

Perspiring, I become part
of the humidity of late summer days.

I hear a rabbit say carpe diem.
I pretend not to understand. I take

10,000 steps a day due to fear
of diabetes and Lou Gehrig's Disease.

I try to appease my history of heart
failure, but I can't stop a locomotive.

On the way home, I know what I need
to do: spray the new grass seed,

put the trash bin on the curb,
get ready for work. I don't know

the exact expiration date of purpose,
but I know the holes in the fence.

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D. L. Pravda tries to keep it together either by jamming distorted reverb juice in his ears or by driving to the country and disappearing into the woodsfarm dimension. Recent poetry appears in Blue Collar Review, Bookends Review, Poetry Quarterly, Rockvale Review and South 85. His book, Normal They Napalm the Cottonfields, is a past winner of the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. Pravda teaches at Norfolk State University.

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