How can anyone
be sure? It's ages now and
I still feel so lost.

© A. Leigh

they asked me what i wanted the headline of my life to be
at a time when it took everything in me
to keep my name out of the obituaries.

There's folk on the news
on the tele tonight
and all of them
making me sad,

they're all of them
thumping on tubs tonight
and waving
American flags,

and it's not so much
the waving I mind,
or the sound
of tubs being thumped,

it's more the thought
that human kind
will thump them
for someone like Trump..

my father was a curator
and my mother sold guns
under their roof we made
art and war.

is there growth in decay?
all I've learned from pain
is how heavy it feels
to be so empty

there are apples in the cafeteria
shrink-wrapped like they were
meant to be shipped off to outer space
but ended up here somehow