Christopher Fried
Small-Town Lights
Internal motions push you out the door,
while thoughts aren't set where, and the engine roars.
You head downtown to where remains some action
despite it's after ten. Lights drive your passion.
The windows down, the soft humming synthwave
takes on the humid air, and all but save
your latest disappointment energizes,
for even the small-town man fantasizes,
and though you keep mute as your heart outpours
when grasping at the neon signs you've fashioned
as myths of variegated lives one craves,
harsh evidence they're low too, brutalizes.
Bio
Christopher Fried lives in Richmond, VA and works as an ocean shipping logistics analyst. A poetry collection All Aboard the Timesphere was published in 2013. His novel Whole Lot of Hullabaloo: A Twenty-First Century Campus Phantasmagoria was published in 2020. Recently, he was an advisor on the 1980s science fiction film documentary In Search of Tomorrow (2022).