poem in progress: no title yet

How can I write a love song
for a place where no love grows,
where love has been buried under beds of gravel,
the foundations of a made-up house.

Where the bones of small
domesticated animals lie in
shallow mass graves,

Where the sunsets signal slow death—
the coughing up of red lung,
the purple of bruised eyes swollen shut,
the yellowing of skin that crumbles under the
slightest touch,

An unholy place of no romance where I was
never born,
where bodies choke the river,
condoms swim in the sewers,
children discover needles hidden in the grass;

Where fathers drown their babies in bathtubs
and mothers stare at cold glass cases full of sirloin
in attempts to remember something they have forgotten,
something primal and ancient,
something they never knew.

Love sleeps here beneath the old rubber tires,
beneath the breath of the wind that scatters paper cups.
Love dies here at the bottom of the well that pumps
poisoned water.

Love lost its way on the streets
that all lead nowhere,
that all look the same. Love lost its way there.

The oak trees uncurl their limbs and then
collapse inside themselves, sour and rotting.
The weeds strangle the daffodils and
someone tears at them,
enraged.

Human souls are locked behind the windows, staring out
at a world that isn’t.
No one lives here
They merely die here.