Sunday's Whirligig # 223

dizzy blame games

everything a blur

humiliation

sing for your supper and smokes

wait at the back

fear has bleached all colour from life

poems lie in the dust

 

bleach blur wait humiliation everything games 

dizzy blame smokes poems sing fear

 

THIS WEEK'S WORDS come from "Lowering Your Standards for Food Stamps" by Sheryl Luna:

Lowering Your Standards for Food Stamps

By Sheryl Luna

 

Words fall out of my coat pocket,

soak in bleach water. I touch everyone’s

dirty dollars. Maslow’s got everything on me.

Fourteen hours on my feet. No breaks.

No smokes or lunch. Blank-eyed movements:

trash bags, coffee burner, fingers numb.

I am hourly protestations and false smiles.

The clock clicks its slow slowing.

Faces blur in a stream of  hurried soccer games,

sunlight, and church certainty. I have no

poem to carry, no material illusions.

Cola spilled on hands, so sticky fingered,

I’m far from poems. I’d write of politicians,

refineries, and a border’s barbed wire,

but I am unlearning America’s languages

with a mop. In a summer-hot red

polyester top, I sell lotto tickets. Cars wait for gas

billowing black. Killing time has new meaning.

A jackhammer breaks apart a life. The slow globe

spirals, and at night black space has me dizzy.

Visionaries off their meds and wacked out

meth heads sing to me. A panicky fear of robbery

and humiliation drips with my sweat.

Words some say are weeping twilight and sunrise.

I am drawn to dramas, the couple arguing, the man

headbutting his wife in the parking lot.

911: no metered aubade, and nobody but

myself to blame.