Pack Your Bags

God doesn't live here anymore.
He moved out.
It used to be such a nice neighborhood, too, when it was first built.
Fresh-faced youth, y'know?
The kind of place you wouldn't mind your kids being out and about in.
They did a newspaper spread on it,
and everybody who lived there wore big, smug smiles
because they knew they were on the up and up.

Then the trouble started.
Gangs.
Rape.
Suicide.
A few tragic accidents and a family or two driven stark
raving
mad.

So God packed his bags,
paid his remaining rent
and got the Hell outta there.
Most everybody followed him,
and you can't really blame them.

It's seen better days, obviously.
There's still some things worth hanging onto,
a few mean scraps left behind by the cars and trucks and moving vans
that roared off into the night
and left this place still and quiet
as a grave.

It's a land of opportunists.
Occasionally the night will be lit up with fire
and smoke
and loud noise
and laughter
at the grandest joke
but most of the time
silence.
Stillness.
The calm before the storm
the calm of frightened people holed up in the only place they've ever known
waiting
waiting
waiting
for the storm to break and the wind to come
and for them all to float away.

Nowhere else to go,
the only home they've ever known.
It's tried to kill them many times
and drink their fear-rich blood
as it pools on the earth
in a deep red flood.

They've seen enough trouble to fight tooth and claw,
but the fight is going out of them,
and the light is dying
and the wind is rising
and this may be their last gasp of polluted air
before the end.