my mother was raised in a dead town \ not dying \ with nothing now but liquor stores \ and empty parking lots littered with cigeratte butts \ and main street is part of a cracking skeletal system \ of roads without railings \ of children with no oppurtunities \ of parents accumsed to hearing a trai9n whistle \ as the only steady thing in their life \ because in dead towns \ jobs don’t hold steady \ people don’t stay \ but there is no escape \ no escape \ unless you get an education \ pay for college by offering your very soul out for a loan / as collateral / and there is escape for you \ no escape \ no escape \ empty stores on saturday \ not buisness on tuesday \ why get in a job when \ it is a one stop town for poverty \ and a mark barely on the map for tourists \ why stop in a dead town \ where forty years ago it was alive \ but times change \ and fire burns down houses \ and farmers loose crops \ and it seems like the world is falling apart \ because this down is dead \ dead\ and the only dying here \ is what athletes feel when they break a bone \ knowing that their only way out was their body \ knowing that their high school football yards were a ticket \ now turning to dust right before their eyes / and there are so many for sale signs / so many broken neon lights / so many crumbling apartments / so many churches with crosses torn down / this down is past dying / this town has been dead for a while now / and there is no escape / no escape / except for the lucky few / who push their bodies past the breaking point / who study until their eyes can’t see / because then those few / find a way / find a way / to escape a dead town / that has tried to imprison the youth / because this place needs more drunkerns / to buy the beer from the only store that gets buisness / so maybe one person can have profit / one person can fix the leaking hole in their roof / from the tree that fell down over two years ago / and when you ask me how my mother escaped / i will tell you that was a farmer’s daughter / who made the town / seem a little bit more alive / from basketball games of cheering / to the homecoming queen parade / and when she left i think the town just died a little bit more / and then when six of her friends died \ in an accident that never should have happened \ an accident that was been wiped from minds \ because of the stained concrete \ because of the train that never stopped \ because of the crushed car \ and the crazy party \ because that train plowed right over \ six teens who went to high school \ on the train tracks \ and when they died \ the town died too \ and it’s been dead ever since.