With You, It's Always The Poor New-Yorkers

October 26, 2007

You say, but there's death.
There is hunger and dehydration
and murder and torture.
There are carnivores and weapons.
There is fire and disease.
Cars drive over people,
and the living eat dead food.
Some kids in New York have never
seen a live cow
or walked on soil barefoot
without fear of dirty needles and broken glass.

I want to say that these are only bodies, only bodies,
that we carry them around,
that all of these will go.
In one hundred and fifty years
not one of us will be here
to recognize the face or hair or gait of another.
These bodies are the meat we antagonize,
not the things that flesh them out.
You are confused.

If anything at all,
we are not to be here.
The world despises us
as much as we do any weed,
and we should accept that fact
as much as we accept
that we will kill the mushrooms
that pop up in brief rings before we uproot them
to make way for grass
that we won't allow to grow.

The Traveller

October 2, 2007

She should have sat elsewhere.
I did not like her,
that girl who squeezed herself in
between me and the bench's wooden arm,
with her faux-suede skirt gripping my thigh.
She smelled like the contents of my grandmother's purse -
crushed sucking candies and tissues and discount hand lotion -
and I thought she must be very lonely or European
to press herself so selflessly against a stranger.
Canadians do not touch each other.
She picked at something gummy stuck to her sweater
while I jiggled my leg in time to the clicks of the clerk's tapping pen.