Featured Image: Lindsey Wasson for Reuters

You are a mental patient with a Master’s degree and an absentee ballot

Driving at 80 miles an hour the wrong way home to escape the killer in the air

You chew, swallow and wash down what you still don’t know you need

Seeing angels drift down to take our grandmas by the hand, children doing cartwheels

Remember salsa dancing on cool August nights with the family, carnival food, fireworks

Feels dark and damp a kiss so tender, like making love to old things

Afraid to forget the world when it was in its right mind

Masturbating in broad daylight to remind yourself how to feel again

The here is blind and deaf and you are the soft fleshy insides of a mother, a stillborn

This moment on a tightrope, a moment of latex gloves and empty cities

It’s a moment of sick people lining the floors of hospital hallways

Of dying alone in a sterile room, a stale white light

Running and screaming for help down the street but nobody is around to hear you

It’s a moment of doctors committing suicide after trying to douse the fire

While those people over there are chanting

Give me liberty or give me death