Our bodies contain too much Mercury
From eating too much fish
Our drinking water contains too much chromium
From weapons testing and industrial pollution
Our media contains too much violence
From saying "all me are equal" but not really meaning it
Our hearts contain too much apathy
Because there's just too much.

15 years ago today
I was ten
And kids were getting pulled from class
Taken home by worried parents
And all the kids were watching the TV sets
In their classrooms
Except for my class
We were not allowed
The teacher
mrs. coyer
Said
"You all see soon enough. It'll be everywhere."
And I hated her for not allowing us to know
But when I got home
And I did know,
I understood
She was trying to protect us
From the image and the terror
Of death.

Her smoke moves like Spanish moss,
Blue-gray tendrils intertwining
Around the shining plastic beads slung low on her wrist,
As she takes another liberal sip from her Budweiser bottle
and does her best to ignore the man she came here with tonight,
he's telling the barmaid about how he got the scar on his right cheek,
And I know parts of their story,
But the thing that troubles me most
Is that I'll never know how it ends.

Here it is,
The end.

I give up,
I give up,
I give up.

If the world be ever changing,
Ever rotating on its wobbly axis,
Then I,
As constituent and citizen of the world,
Be ever changing too.

I was born hot, and wet, and loud, the last day of June.
And now I have grown,
And I have grown cold,
Because the hurt of learning
The pain of change, and the disappointment,
Has eaten to oxygen from the flame of joy
I was born holding
In my chest.

Were that I could find ignition within,
Some magic bit of unlockable truth,
rather than casting out my net of questions,
And attending to the ones who bite.

When I see the people abandon their old American Dream,
I read about their travels, their hungers and their happinesses,
I wonder if it is
madness
or if it is
love
which has inspired their souls
to commit the ultimate treason-
the pursuit of freedom.

Sweat pours from the places where my bones meet
My eyes shut against the glare of oil on asphalt
The wind carries whispers of rain, makes the leaves dance and fall
My skin radiates and tightens as I walk
Cars trundle past and around me, I hear them make their way
And I think about my mom, and about food, and about showering when I get home
This isn't a poem, is it
It's just me