The Democracy of Dirt

The streetlights flicker their last tired breaths

as the night settles in, thick as damp velvet.

Somewhere beyond the trees,

a siren wails and then thinks better of it.

The world exhales.

Here, in this forgotten cemetery

where the city’s glow dies at the gate,

the gravestones lean like old drunks

whispering secrets to the moss.

The names carved into them have been sanded down

by rain, wind, and the indifference of passing centuries.

No one remembers these people. No one visits.

Even the crows have moved on to better neighborhoods.

And yet the place hums.

Not with ghosts — nothing so theatrical —

but with the quiet, stubborn dignity of

lives that never made the history books.

The butcher who sang to himself while sharpening knives.

The seamstress who dreamed of Paris but never made it past the county line.

The boy who wrote poems no one read and

buried them under his mattress like contraband hope.

They lie here now, equal in the democracy of dirt.

The world never saw what they could’ve been.

Maybe one of them had a mind sharp enough to split atoms or write epics.

Maybe one carried a heart big enough to save someone who needed saving.

But poverty, circumstance, and the grinding machinery of daily

survival swallowed their brilliance before it ever sparked.

The city rushes past them,

headlights slicing through the fog,

unaware that it drives over a thousand unwritten stories.

And the speaker — me, you, whoever wanders here at dusk —

feels the tug of that anonymity. The reminder that

ambition is a fragile thing, easily crushed under the weight of

rent, illness, heartbreak, or the simple fact of being born in the wrong century.

In the end, the grave doesn’t care about résumés.

But there’s a strange comfort in that. A leveling. A mercy.

So I stand here, listening to the wind thread itself through the iron gate,

and imagine my own epitaph — not carved in marble,

but drifting somewhere between the branches:

A wanderer who tried.

A voice that cracked but kept speaking.

A heart that beat, stubbornly, against the dark.

And whatever walks here — memory, time, the echo of the forgotten — walks with me.

 

N.P.: “Worlock” – Skinny Puppy