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