The Future Is Rusty

Barns, with their sweaty Gambrel retaining the moisture of mornings,
Sit in place by their respective crop fields
Withering away for decades, centuries,
Entitled, as if they always belonged.
Born out of modish mutterings, the hammering of nails,
Sometimes they’re next to great green corn stalks going on for just about forever
Or sometimes beside a lion mane of wheat
Golden and brilliant on a sunny day,
Wilted and subfusc on others.
Why interrupt something so empty and vast?

Barns pretend they are ancient
With their splintering, soon to be sundering wooden boards
Made of an old oak bygone.
They always have this Reddish brown paint
applied by some young and hopeful family
Still on its wood to this very moment, but fading every day.
Whenever I run my hand along a pig pen railing
Or the old fifteen-foot-high doors
that make strange noises from their throats whenever you open them,
Begging hopelessly for just a sip of cider,
I don’t feel bark, or sweeping branches, or owls living in their funny little hallows
I feel only splinters.
Cider isn’t made around these parts anymore.

They pretend with their rusted roosters,
A weathervane adorned, perched above us all and pointing.
I like to imagine a specific barn back when the Carters, perhaps it was the Adams, lived there,
And how they would find late-night storms in the 19th century particularly irritating
Not only because of the boisterous thunder
But because of the rooster upon the roof who didn’t understand crowing was for the mornings
And who instead cried a metallic squeak every time he got spun around.
These birds point towards the wind, but I can’t help but see how
It always seems to want me to go in the same ol’ direction,
Forwards.
And sometimes I just don’t wanna go
Where roosters tell me too.