A Hole In The Wall

On a day in July we got

To wear the accolade

Worst in the world (air quality)

And millions look to blame

While millions shave their face

Painting nails, daily jogging into

Gulping breaths

While millions up in flames

Persons, places, things

That will never be

From high above

Glass cages peering over

A muted sun spills blunted rays

Haze on sepia streets

My home is a hospital

And the walls are stained

As always

The hallways with our photos

The drapes that haven’t changed

Gloves on my vanity

A mask on my humanity

And the patient is a stranger

And it is not, at all, her fault

How she wears her face

Now, I’m no good in hospitals

Puffs of clouds over silos

Like an old man’s cigars

Craning between the farms

Green hills and rain channels

Taxing the wind as it rolls

Find that lake, gem in the corn

And feel the red-hot iron sun

Open window, tomato arm

Give it gas, the big hill climb

Where the worries go

To the watering hole

Sudden rain, pouring on

The thirsty birds scattering

Like their kids from the fuzz

Rain checked

We must

Under the grumble of thunder

It flies and falls

It doesn’t fall there

The weight of nations

Knowing

Where

Planets

There, there, little Planet,

that is,

how little time so deemed,

away your frozen tears

how prideful, to be

and be

Queers,

queer folk,

that is,

othered and strange

eccentric in vivid ways

in the gravity of savage taste

The eccentric orbit of Pluto, so far

away in the dark, skipping gayly

past Neptune’s trident, sharp,

that is,

a pilgrim on his way

to taste a lick of Sun

The slate blue crush of night sky

A dimly shimmering atmosph-air sack

Blurring the reach of eons

From dust bunnies and their mud trails

And the voice of the dreamer(s)

Cast deep and reach yon-smack! the

Mosquito on the arm

Not butterfly’s wings that christen kings

Just take the fractured ounce of guilt

For a drop of own blood spilled

And so, get back to writing it out

Does that make it brilliant?

Like slapping a green label

On deep-fried corn sugar

Strap in, oh god-like critics

With god-like whims

Of what is and isn’t 

The robots don’t have hearts, exactly 

No soul of their own

As they are not our children

Rather, prosthetic limbs

An extension of our collective

Wills and wants to reach further

Step farther into a dark unknown 

Of a cosmos we were given 

By who-knows-what, exactly

With eyes and tongues and tips

Of fingers that cannot touch

All of it, exactly

I’m not in need of a poet’s arm

So I won’t prompt a single piece

As no one then would pay me

Well, no one pays me anyway

For this muddy slop of mine

My (stolen) lexical iconography 

But shaming those with missing feet

Who want to feel the wind

And the shock of their weight

Hitting ground, in their spine

“You didn’t run, not like me”

Or cast the lot of villainy

On promethean sparks

In the shadows of deep eternity 

It couldn’t be me, exactly

My flesh of holy flame

That sloughs and dries

Into dust on my bookshelves

So hate this human drivel

Or don’t

And I will say

The Poet is dead

The A.I. did it

So here he scrawls

In his Grave

It is possible that the agent believed, at that point, the car was coming toward him.

But the car didn’t keep moving straight forward. She completed turning the wheel and was moving away (something the dead-shot eagle-eye of the marksman could/should have seen through the windshield he used to aim at her face) before the first shot was fired. Except the agent was more focused on ending a life than caring about that fact. He drew that gun like Annie Oakley as soon as there was a modicum of justification, itching to put down a, in his words, “fucking bitch.”

It does not matter that this happened in seconds or what the agent felt for a split second. The objective truth is in that moment she was no threat to anyone’s life but she was killed anyway. If she didn’t die instantly, Renee, a poet, mother, known sensitive soul, knew she meant no harm and died understanding that she had been murdered by the authorities.

And that’s all without considering the preceding events, her deescalation attempt or the conflicting orders she’d been given (reminiscent of Daniel Shaver—given orders impossible to follow so he could be executed extrajudicially..almost like there’s a problem with giving gun-wielding authorities broad immunity for suspect killings.)

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