The Walking Tour Poem by Raj Dronamraju

Do you know anything about the streets you walk?
The history of an empty storefront
The life of a building and its many makeovers
The lives that carried on inside and cleaved off chunks of time for that purpose

Economics make a miserable solution to the ongoing lifecycle of a town, a place
Somewhere to come back to
Somewhere to use as a reference point to find somewhere else

The house eagerly shown by a pair of grinning realtors
Comes with the accumulated mind scream of prior tenants
Those tenants burnt their initials into a psychic foundation
But they tell it a different way
"I am not liberated by where I am"

Let them rally round the public library
With banners celebrating a town's centennial
While the disease of modern life aggressively allies itself with the changing face of a community
They are not so much rewriting history as just ignoring it
A new coat of paint and it's like we were all born yesterday