I thirst.
You rip through here
a hurricane
biting through civilians and officials alike
until their bloodshed stains the streets
and the streams tick off the tally of your victims
your only aim to crush and maim
regardless of the death toll
or the reason
or the phasing of the moon
And then come crashing down again
while we are left, shaking our heads,
to sweep your secrets
into crematoria and coffins
Then dust off our hands
to wipe away your tears
and scrub away the fever
That leaves a ring of soapy sickness
in your bathwater
And then hold you,
bitter infant,
until the tide falls away
The constants, the healers,
What some call the mothers
though you are not our blood children
We are the ones that soothe your cuts and burns
Listen to your side of the story
And settle the fights of dollar bills
and ancestors
that you scorn without abandon
Hear you simper for a lullaby
As we rock you back to sleep
But the sighs don’t escape
until after we’ve checked under the bed for monsters
for the hundredth
or the thousandth
or the millionth time this week;
we can’t let you catch on
that the only real beasts lie within ourselves.
We would give you the moon
Had you not tamed it
And the deserts for your sandbox
But no matter what we give
You want it all you want it all
And we want nothing
NOTHING
in return
Just a single peaceful night,
vengeful child,
tea stirred with vanilla and sleep
but your screamings pierce our dreams
and nightmares
We are the worrywarts
The unsure
The cautious and the skeptics
Who don’t believe in jumping on the bed
Or in other such adventures
We are wrinkled brows and unpressed collars
The “it’s for your own good”s and the seamstresses
That stitch your heart back together
Before it’s broken one time too many
And you end up like us.
We are the aftermath, the backstory,
the prayers and dictionaries
that make it out of life alive
The Barmecidal harmony, the snatches of hymns
We are the scraps of coffee-tainted paper
that you slap against the telephone poles
As if the taste of scathing news-ink
is a bandage for the hurting
And we fold debris into our kerchiefs
saving them as souvenirs
And you call us close-minded
You call us cowards
As you snap your jaws and roar
down a vast and lonesome prairie
like the wind
Fast to laugh
and quick to run away
As we wander the streets lonely,
the gaslamps shattered on the cobblestones,
and stoop to collect the pieces
of the life you left behind.
Forgive them, Father,
for they know not what they do.