The world I belong to has long since been forgotten.
Pink bricks from each rise and fall of the sun.
What is, has been changed.
What was, has been removed entirely.
Yet I remain.
Gone is the history.
Gone are the stories.
Gone are the times.
Yet I remain.

In the coffee house, they brew tasteless water.
What has happened to the quiet study?
The crowd is too noisy and the new placement of the sun burns my eyes.
The fireplace has been replaced with screens
The quiet rumblings of the train swapped with the sounds of registers and capital.
I’ve become lost in this world, for all I have comes from all I’ve seen.
I could call them savages for living as they are.

But sitting just across the room
An old man whose posture has given into time.
He sits with a furrowed brow,
Stomping weathered shoes on the wood floor,
Strumming cracked fingers on a worn guitar.
A tired rumble matching the pace of his strings.
After each quiet performance in the chair by the window
He murmurs and writes in the notebook next to him
Until his hands find their way back to the guitar
and the next performance begins, stronger.
He sits there, seemingly oblivious to that fear.

I’m not sure why I stayed for so long.
I imagine, I won’t hear the good blues play until I get where I’m going.
But right now,
In this uncanny retracing of someone I knew so well,
I can hear its soul.
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