{"id":129551,"date":"2023-09-02T12:04:08","date_gmt":"2023-09-02T16:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/?p=129551"},"modified":"2023-09-02T13:08:31","modified_gmt":"2023-09-02T17:08:31","slug":"hour-3-small-town-songs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/hour-3-small-town-songs\/","title":{"rendered":"Hour 3: Small Town Songs"},"content":{"rendered":"

The only catcall whistle is the squeaking of the local grocery store\u2019s automatic door echoing into the almost empty parking lot when a few of us stragglers are making the almost-forgot milk run at 10pm\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And we all compare neighborhoods by how many traffic lights they have, how many drunks there are next door, how wide the shoulders are\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And the asphalt has memory here, more specifically the potholes, that we timed on the school bus like advanced physicists because if we got it just right, we could fly\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And the tax dollars take decades to trickle into road repairs letting our childhoods linger a while before they are paved over\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And the boredom is a tractor tempting our engines, it\u2019s all gonna take as long as it takes, and what are we in such a rush for?<\/span><\/p>\n

Small towns move slow but fear rest\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The clean unclobbered hands a sign of shame\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And the forests have needles of metal on their floors to accompany the beer bottles and the cigarettes. Nothing grows from this kind of compost it just sits and waits and waits\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And they were going to make \u2018Born to Run\u2019 our state song\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Springsteen had grown up in a small town like mine\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Wrote about his father becoming one with the local dive barstool\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

About the teens who married first loves because there weren\u2019t others to find\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the final vote on TV, a Senator stood up and asked a question:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Why would you choose for an anthem of your home\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

One that sings only of running from it?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And just like that, every radio dial dived in protest\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And the kids in the abandoned viaducts sprayed the chorus in graffiti notes\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And the older couple that owns the farmstand began to waltz\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And the cornfields became soundwaves from the river to the summer camp\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And the diner windows quivered in syrup\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As the old methodist church choir switched faiths a moment in praise of our small, our stuck, our one-road masses\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But the vote was lost anyway, so we shook our heads over bad coffee\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And spat one resounding, tobacco coated <\/span>\u2018Cityboy\u2026\u2019<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

He cannot know\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That running and arriving have no meaning\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If you do not know deeply the soil from which you started<\/span><\/p>\n

That town which, despite you never choosing it back\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

will still hold you close when you return.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The only catcall whistle is the squeaking of the local grocery store\u2019s automatic door echoing into the almost empty parking lot when a few of us stragglers are making the almost-forgot milk run at 10pm\u00a0   And we all compare neighborhoods by how many traffic…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5310,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5310"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129551"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":129567,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129551\/revisions\/129567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}