I touch concrete on my knees-
Wounds, hot flesh, a familiar sting.

I bleed to scab,
Pick and itch more.

"All is fair in love and war."

The tiny red ant scampers
In a forest of greenish mold
Its bristly legs carrying
Biological modules:
A head with pincers
An imperceptible thorax
A swelling abdomen.

It has nothing but a laborious drive
A pheromone-induced servility
For the queen: the lazy, bloated tyrant!
The sole purpose being
The laying of eggs.

The noble red ant
Moves on to scavenge
Blind and dumb
Oblivious.

To the ruthless cycle
Of its existence.

I ******* miss you
Wish I could kiss you
I'm furiously mad at you
Tried to be good for you
Feel ******* sad without you

Dumb and ignorant are not synonyms. Dumb, well, means dumb, but ignorant means uneducated. Dumb people will vote for Criminal Trump. Ignorant people may vote for Criminal Trump. Educated people, people who know the principles of democracy, will likely vote for Biden, not because he is brilliant, but because he is decent. Our nation was built on slavery and genocide. Blacks and the autochthonous were the victims. The progeny of slavery is racism. Racism permeates America. Criminal Trump, a vitriolic racist (redundant, but for good reason) himself, as was his father, will sell his rotten soul to garner four more years in the Oval Office rather than in a prison cell. Dumb, dumber, and dumbest, right? Criminal Trump wouldn't mind a little plagiarism, would he? He is functionally illiterate. Dumb as a rock. So we come full circle:  simply, there are more dumb people and uneducated people than reasonably intelligent people in America. But it doesn't take too much intelligence to mark a ballot or to wave the Stars and Stripes or to hate others whose skin is a slightly different shade than yours.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

I tried to give
him all of me
at just seventeen
but he only ever wanted
my body

wrote him letters
with a little too much
vulnerability
sealed them with lipstick kisses
sent them overseas
heart praying
foolishly

he only answered
if I tucked in
a Polaroid peek

always left me
hungry
never cared to know
the real me
had reservations
about taking my virginity
didn't want that kind of bond
"it makes girls clingy"

when he came home
I didn't love him anymore
but I was numb
and ached to feel
anything

it shouldn't
have been surprising-
we were never
meant to be

today i am
my own conjoined twin
ribcage aching where i've stuck myself
with desperate thumbtacks to the illusory
ever-flowering concept board of "i"
to save them the trouble of bleaching
my soaking contradictions from the
carpet that makes my elbows itch

sleeping syrup tiptoes on the brain
but if you drink that, you can't have ***
now that would be a tragedy
not getting drunk alone in 30 degree weather
to write unintelligible psalms to friends
imagine that

so with one arm at the equator
in the moulting, drooling sun
and one closer to the bed
in some casual western Spring
i try to balance myself
with this sad little twin
forgetting, for a second,
which one is me,
a little too painfully
awake