The medusa stare

Walking out onto streets of blight and misery,
Where strangers glance then quickly look away, with eyes that speak a thousand words in one, from weathered faces lined with years of pain, gorgon gaze entranced, what is real in this land of lives exiled...out beyond the pale, to eat the gruel and scraps of yesterday's false conquests, reliving each act in hollowed atrophy, tasting pleasures of the flesh in absence, these countless ways we sacrifice and lose, to live in stone, entrapped, ensnared, unblessed, unloved...then die... welcome to the other side, to be a face in the crowd unknown, where we all sing along to the tired same refrain, fed from birth, for what it's worth on gray cloud dawns, and black sky dusks ...doom.