On the Move

Bursts of hail and heavy downpours,

resolute, gray, and dismal rain.

Shaggy pine trees overshadow guard rails.

I stumble on the road to nowhere

jammed with angry, hungry folks

seeking shelter from sheer boredom,

humming uplifting folk songs,

shoplifting a bit of happiness 

from the shelves of the rural stores.

Silver lettering reads LOVE

on the roof of a tumbledown house.

My world trembles around me,

I page through the fluffy ball of memories,

I invested too much in the writing to stop now.

Lonely and forsaken, 

I move from the floor to the sofa

swallowing salted sorrow,

typing the phone number,

a collection of digits.

It’s assigned a new area code since I lived there,

but those seven numbers, 

they are still the same,

exactly the same.

Such pain every time

to touch the buttons, 

listen to a pregnant pause,

hit the nail in the coffin of love,

destroying the sandcastle 

populated with crocodiles and cactuses

with the authority of a weathered writer.

Hitting the nail on my head,

deleting the dead seven numbers.

© Helen Kanevsky, 2018

AT&T Push-button telephone
from Wikipedia