I feel my energy cohering here and I haven’t dipped a toe into the World-famous mineral springs. The sweet mid-seventies breezes fresh from my childhood seem to be reviving my immune system as if I’d gotten a booster shot for optimism. The dry air evaporates way-too-long-believed-in impossibilities. My perspective’s widening now that I’m out of those endlessly narrow, hazy hills in the East. I’ve never worn cowboy boots, but I’m for sure a Westerner, and even a temporary transplant here energizes me—tree-mendously.

There’s nothing fancy about this place. It smells like the musty sanatorium it certainly once was. Rooms cost about the same as a Super 8 strip mall flophouse, and a box fan in the window more than adequately compensates for the lack of central air conditioning. The outside air arrives already properly conditioned.

Maybe we should just up and move West now. There might have never been a boy less suited to swamp life or a girl less comfortable with a concrete canyon career. Sure, we can always submit to periodic booster shots, but couldn’t we choose to relocate to a place where the climate doesn’t encourage dis-ease?

The West demands audacious thinking; they don’t call it the Wild West for nothing!

Mosquitos can’t fly a mile in the sky.
Perspective can’t thrive in a swamp.
Somewhere between the muck and the mountains
must be a place we could thrive.
We could find if we tried another place we could hide
from the soil where our roots first found ground.
We’re smart and we’re strong and we’d vie just as long
as we needed to survive to return
to land better suited to our souls’ constitutions,
but could such re-dedications suffice?
Or would we be smothering our terror in re-conditioned error
where the climate can’t help but infect?

I suspect we both know where that exile would go.

I expect we’d be trading the possibility of home
for the certainty of outpost again.
Where aspirations would vie for a glimpse of a sky
grey horizons deny could be there.

A strong immune system might be better than the very best booster shot, but native soil renders irrelevant even the strongest immune system; the booster shot to end all need for booster shots.

No defense needed without the dis-ease.

©2012 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: Homeless