Everson Walls

I saw people I had known exhausting their final reserves clawing their way in the direction of a wall, one that lingered lazily, whose eternal reaches lay well outside of anything that any of them might hope to achieve. When I was four, I saw some of it; the rest I saw when I was sixteen and most of the rest when I was nineteen . We used to stand in awe of it, this wall. Sometimes, you know, some southern kid or someone from a place you couldn’t imagine existed—somewhere in Missouri or a place like that—like a place from where anyone in his right head could only hope to escape---some kid like that used to carry broken baggage with him..a limp or a dragging slow sidecar….or a slut you can’t shake….,I think that some of the worst things you’ll ever see are my neighbors.