What a luxury this is,
to **** indoors,
when what’s out there is so oppressive,
in so many ways.

Let us speak to one another
of our shadow-lived lives.
We’ll use words of romance,
reverence, street-toughened
prideful parlance.

We’ll speak openly, shamelessly
of ******* outside.

This phrase seems to be
the only applicable euphemism
for a life spent tripping over corpses,
seeing swarms of golden bees buzz by our brains,
the fatality of their sting
as yet unknown to us.

We’ll smoke awhile,
speaking of our children as well.
We’ll pretend that we give a ****
what their future holds, knowing all that needs to be
known happens in the immediate,
the now.

(The next score, the next hit, the next left-handed dollar,
the blood-blackened sky,
ruling
reigning,
******* outside.)

Still,
we speak sentences,
bits,
set-backs full of ‘do as I say, not as I do’,
fully expecting to protect everyone
but ourselves,
all the while continuing to
**** outside.

Finally,
we end up here;
the now here,
nowhere.

This place,
with it’s all-too-honest
hallways where we can lie
and deny that we did it to ourselves,
our children, our families.

We know,
that poverty and parenting
play their respective,
inter-generational roles.

Yet,
in the end,
each of us has at least a modicum of understanding
that there are alternatives
to the ineffective intellectual
toilet-bowl mentality
that keeps us
******* outside.

*
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2020