At the corner of Progress and Small Town

Given recent life events, it looks like Abel and I might be jumping the small town ship. For years now, we've been biding our time while I got my degree, but it's finally happening. I'm graduating in May, and we are just exhausted with small town politics and redneck ideologies.

There is only so far that a gay couple can move up in the world of East Texas. It would be nice to know that my career has no glass ceiling, and that I can be in an area where opportunity abounds.

Below is a poem I wrote about East Texas that I thought was appropriate.

Love and Lyte,

Fire Lyte

East Texas

You are bare-boned knuckles and broken backs
and working until you forget what daylight smells like.
You are one leaking roof after another and the lines
of a painting that turned out more like circles
and someone comes along and tells you they’re
supposed to be triangles.
You are the 37-year-old kindergarten student who
somehow makes a living – with the social capacity
of a flea and the audacity to look down in condemnation
as I break myself to become something more.
You are stoic and regurgitating senseless dogma
about pride in your smallness.
You are the great wall of filth I must break myself
into the littlest of pieces to fit through and find
the Underground Gravy Train to a day where
rest and weary might permanently find each other.