The roar of the garbage truck
interrupting our mundane miserable
doesn’t have anything on me!
I wonder when my tired neighbor will
squash me like a summertime mosquito.
One night when I go out to see
Oh! How cold the concrete steps can get
with no sun to bleed into them!
This serious meditation is my usual way.
Some nobody said my neighbor was too pale
to be a real Mexican,
So there I sat, tilted my head-
My glare stopped the universe.
Still, I know
it doesn’t make the slightest difference to you
that I didn’t laugh instead.
What do you talk about
when you talk about me?
I’ll throw my pennies down that it’s
my dumpster mouth or my seemingly pointless
walkabouts where I stop at half the crossroads
and roll up the loose ankles on my secondhand jeans.
I wonder how much you see.
I’ll have you – and the world – know
that I am different like everybody else.
Not quite like the classic misunderstood and
tortured soul. No, not like the school bully with
two homes a or a lifeless clay body buried under
the banks of Mean Creek
More like the neighborhood child
with a dumpster mouth yet the sweetest
see-through smile that your tired eyes
ever did lay on.
I don’t think existence is ready to know
about my time freezing glares, I steal comfort in knowing that I don’t know it all. In my mind
you are not boiled down to a fleeting smile
whenever life throws us together though
that is all I see.
Please do the same for me.
Next time you hear the quick stepped
rubber thudding you know is mine going
off on another angry suburban mission.
You are in your car, can’t seem to find the
key, you heard enough last night and it’s
hard to breathe.
Remember friend!
Though I am the least,
there is more to me.
In your mind, I hope, I am still alive,
Still conscious and very much alive
Still moving around in the way that I do
and
alive.
I hope that I am not reduced
to a quiet little mess of brown and sticky
bug blood
mosquito
that
I
am.