Intermission 911

Your surgical steel digs in my chest

How can I sleep?

How can I rest?

When the thought of you brings

No anesthetic

And I find myself

Drowning in your tears

 

Somehow I can hear him cry

Over the earthquakes of the world

A waiting cloud

Just a grey mass

Looking below

 

His eyes shifting

Erratic desperation

In need of society’s fix

The bandage of community

And togetherness

Though the knot comes undone

With every head turned the other way

Robotic stiffness

Automatic disregard

A world fabricated by labels

 

Hate

Isolation

Misery

Lies

These are the hands that we hold him with

The bulletin we pierce on his heart

The tramp-stamp tattooed on his soul

 

What of him?

What of we?

 

The tires screech in the distance

The sirens blare

The lights bleed on to the pavement…

 

Shortness of breath

A draining pulse

His life is what you made it…

What we made it

 

A slamming door

Rushing footsteps

A white figure graces to his side…

 

Truth

Acceptance

Love

 

Put the paddles to his chest

Now

And fill him with these words

 

His eyes shifting…

Erratic desperation…

We see him as dying

But when will it be our intermission

To see him as a whole?

 

2014 Vincent Cuccolo