Tumbleweeds jutted with sandspurs

navigate the dry grooves of my mind

probing for dead thoughts and fossilized behaviors.

They prick the dormant ambition, dried and petrified 

by sands of time stretching through dunes of eternity.

This wasteland of regret breaks my spirit, 

and I am no longer whole. I'm half a man 

under the weight of ideologies caked between

my eyes and my heart. I should have trusted

the map my father gave me that his father gave him.

Maybe then I would not be so lost

in such a familiar place.