The Salton Sea

The air is parched and crinkled, heavy with no place to go; with no sense of time, hanging suspended over the Salton Sea, 100 hundred miles in the middle of nowhere. A flat blue sky, swathed in pillows of hazy clouds drift towards a scorching yellow disc, aflame like a blast furnace that sears the land into ugly tweed brown, turning water into salt. There are no green lawns in this place, just empty rooms once populated by tourists, idling their days away in motels watching speed boats that roared across a sea in the middle of nowhere. Now, sea water evaporates into a gritty salty mist, as a few hang on waiting for the end. No one is sure when it will happen, perhaps when there are only shadows with their memories. This is a place of tumbled down dance halls, now occupied by the ghosts dancing through the fabric of time; an ethereal palace dome crumbling to ruin and decay, like brothers in arms. There are empty stores with the front door always open, rattling against the frame as the wind bares down hard on another street of forgotten dreams and broken promises. Skelton frames of buildings, suspended in a place and a time, long ago, captured by black and white photos of people long gone from the Salton Sea. Ancient ruins, the dust of a hard desert wind howls itself hoarse as the night closes in on open windows of empty houses alive with the shades that will never leave this place. Floors are littered with glass, empty beer bottles, broken chairs waiting to tumble to the floor. There are no rainbows left in this place, only the tears and the years of living and leaving. Regrets add up with nothing to show for it except the promise of a different day tossed up to the cries of the squeaking birds overhead. Like dots across a blue sky flanked by the boarded up homes, burned inside out against dreams falling into the Salton Sea, 100 hundred miles in the middle of nowhere.