Epedemic

I have no heart for idle conversation
My eyes are torn open too wide
To close at the caress of ignorance
My ears abused by the lashing
Of hooked tongues that aim
To sink into soft flesh, refusing
To let go.

Sometimes I imagine bruises on my face
From invisible fists making skin tender
O! How I'd rather feel their blows than feel
The tug of a zipper being pulled shut
Over my lips and the tray balanced
On my head, being still as a porcelain doll.
Conventional delight is little
More than the sugar cubes for the teapot, just as heavy as a porcelain dish full of the bricks that built this home.

America has no heart for me!
O home of the free where voices
Meld in a crucible of suffering
How we have grown from it!
After thousands of years the roots
Should be sunk deep enough in the Earth to Pierce out the other side and form gnarled domes, shelters for every man,
woman, and
child

Have we not suffered enough?
I pat the unsavory answer from my mouth
Staring at the lipstick stain on the corner
Of the white linen and wonder
How my neck can hold these pearls
A dazzling collar to choke any words
My lips could think to speak in answer

In this eggshell, already cracked
Like the dirt on your hands
The smell of another man's dollar
On your shirt and your eyes that try
Too hard to hide the red rash of split skin from blasted heat, the glow of the hammer
That glazed them with incessant light

Three generations sit at this table
Exchanging words like blows
My mouth, moves as they want
My tongue, molds words as they want
My head nods as you talk of people
Finding their answers through the thick glass
Of a vodka bottle, filtering kaleidoscopes
Onto their eyes that are ripped from one side of their head to the other
And I wonder if there they find, in scattered spectrums of color
A heart for idle conversation.