This City Holds Me

This town is a place where nothing seems to rhyme

yet everyone's part of the same AM station

Compassion on the corner with the cardboard sign

and the foreign exchange student with a new iPhone

Walking in his $80 Toms smoking a fag as he

wonders why this city's so dirty

Yet all breathing the same petrichor winds,

fickle and winding and too goddamn old

As stubborn nations rise up

between the swingsets of an old man's heart,

I want to feel like I don't belong here

in this dark concrete maze of bygone years,

uprisings, new seas of thought and rebellion,

but I do. The city holds me fast against its chest,

distrustful, but welcoming as a matter of course

as if it's in the very veins of the city to entice change

without ever really changing.