I was summarily dismissed from The Dark Poet’s Guild for this one.
The parade lumbers past my bay window.
The street is now a home movie.
Yellowed, clicking, frame by frame.
Third grade, retrograde.
What did I learn?
I sit at a makeshift desk in my dining room, where I never dine. It is now converted into a work-at-home autonomous zone. I see the yellowed junkies and their needles, the reeking homeless, bags of oily rags in puddles of piss, the faux vegans and soy boys and cucks and angry neo-feminist white lesbians and transgender misfits, dicks wagging, fingers, too, all torn up by searing anger, the kind so red-hot it can only come from within, deep, where one should never be touched, especially by your own hand. Rather than find a therapist, they turn their self-hating outward and spew it on me, my window—my view littered—and I do not give a fuck, and I offer no healing words, no soft poultice, and I do not receive them because they are a sandstorm of butcher knives, and I have work to do.
I am not a kind, gentle mirror.
My floor is poison.
My eyes, shattered, shards.
Seven years of bad luck under my feet.
But the show must go on.
Apparently, the dark is also afraid of the dark.