Mine was a rip-torn childhood
interpolated between the echos of lifetimes past
and the lives I had not yet lived.

I watched the world go by for days
out of the window of the big, red Ford truck
we called home.

The scorching blue sky
reflected through the window
and burned a terrible feeling of emptiness so deep
inside me that I can still sense it
now and then groaning like a monster under the bed.

My four sisters became my best friends,
my pseudo-children, and my playmates.
Most of all, they were my compass, for where ever they were
I was too and together we were home.

We drove a million miles, maybe more,
with no particular destination.
There was no such thing as one destination after all
just an eternity of power lines and
factories that poisoned tumbleweed neighborhoods
scattered along the endless roads of anywhere USA.

The whole world seemed to be full of mostly all the wrong things
and I wanted to grow up and make it all bran new.