October 21, 2011

• the bough is breaking and the cradle is falling

   

   

  it’s two a.m.
  the emergency room psychiatrist looks up from his clipboard
  with eyes paid to care
  and asks me if I see people who aren’t really there
  I say, “I see people…
  how the hell am I supposed to know
  if they’re real or not?”
  he doesn’t laugh
  neither do i
  the math’s not on my side
  ten stitches and one lie..
  i swear i wasn’t trying to die
  i just wanted to see what my pulse looked like from the
  inside

  fast forward one year
  i’m standing in an auditorium behind a microphone
  reading a poem to four hundred latino high school kids
  who live with the breath of the INS
  crawling up their mother’s backbones
  and i am frantically hiding my scars
  cause the last thing i want these kids to know
  is that i ever thought that my life was too hard

  i’ve never seen a bomb drop

  i’ve never felt hunger …

  i’ve also never seen lightning strike
  but we’ve all heard thunder
  and it doesn’t take a genius to tell something’s burning
  the smoke rises between us
  forming walls so high
  they split the sky like slit wrists
  and then the stars fall like blood
  we’re all left with nothing but a death wish

  he said, “call me by my true name
  i am the child in uganda all skin and bone”
  do you remember the rest?
  how about this one…
  jesus wept
  america, jesus wept
  but look at your eyes
  dry as the desert sand
  dusting the edges of your soldier’s wedding bands
  look at your soul playing dead
  because your ribcage is abu ghraib
  is san quintin
  is guantanamo bay
  and your heart had beaten them so many times
  they bleed the moon

  do you know children in palestine fly kites
  to prove that they’re still free?
  can you imagine how that string
  must feel between their fingers
  as they kneel in the cinders of our missile heads
  you can count the dead by the colors in the sky

  the bough is breaking
  the cradle is falling
  right now a six-year old girl is crutched in a ditch in Lebanon
  wishing on falling bombs
  right now our government is recording the test scores
  of black and Latino 4th graders
  to see how many prison beds will be needed in the year 2015

  right now there’s a man on the street outside my door
  with outstretched hands full of heart beats no one can hear
  he has cheeks like torn sheet music
  every tear broken crescendo falling on deaf ears

  can you see God’s face from here
  eyes so full of despair they
  cry hurricanes and fifty food tsunamis
  doctor, our insanity is not that we see people who aren’t there
  it’s that we ignore the ones who are
  till we find ourselves scarred and ashamed
  walking into emergency rooms at two a.m.
  flooded with a pain we cannot name or explain
  bleeding from the outside in
  our skin is not impervious
  culture’s build on greed and destruction
  do not pick and choose who they kill
  we all fill the graves

  do we really believe our need for Prozac
  has nothing to do with Baghdad,
  with Kabul, with the Mexican border
  with the thousands of US school kids
  bleeding through budget cuts that will never heal
  to fuel war tanks?
  thank god for denial
  thank god we can afford the makeup
  to pile upon the pretty world
  look at all the smiling people
  and the sky with a missile between her teeth
  and a steeple through her heart
  and not a single star left to hold her

  and the voices of a thousand broken nations saying
  “wake me, wake me, when the American dream is over”

  • 7:20 pm
  • 5 Comments