Canaan

Monologue written by Peter Lacarenza

"For that year, your guise was the little patch of woods
That stood behind your house.
A spared phalanx of spindly elms
On the edge of what once was.

The train made its way through it every hour,
And that streak of tired green light barrels by,
clacking through the fecund underbrush.
You'd listen to it as you tried to fall asleep.

It was that tamed country aesthetic
in which you sough solace.
It came in the morning on the sprinklings of dew
and faded with each sentimental sunset,
which were like marmalade.

I've tried to understand it myself,
but it is almost too much.
It is a river of muffled feelings and anxiety,
a deep drink of silences,
a nostalgia for the things that used to bring you joy.

Yet you crumble to its neuroses,
with your paranoid sense of necessary reassurance.
The expanses of serpentine bliss and snaking paths
that grow cindery in the late summer
looped themselves around you,
binding you to this most typical of place names.

I have watched you wither,
and succumb to this strange place.
With a sense of disillusionment,
you sought your perfection.

So you constructed your glass jar,
all vacuumed up with your sanity.
You perched it on the ridge top where you could watch
the manic depression unfold,
teeming under the emerald grass."