To Smile

27 11 2010

I’m grand, doing really grandly feeling like a thousand bucks,

Up on my luck I’m wondering if my wanderings will

Free my blue, fateful, lonesome, absolute stillness.

But the freezing carseats dark, dark and sharp, arid engine breeze

Freeze-dry my restless heart, melts me apart

Into scattered dirt forever nourished and nourishing.

Dirt so collective pushing me skyward as I trot, toward leafless boughs mincing sunshine

On my soft scattered facial muscles stretching, contracting, contorting just to smile,

Releasing teeth wrapped up in pink, red, gummy flesh slick and slimy to freedom.

A man’s toils under the boiling sun beating down on whooshing fields of wheat,

A woman winnowing the chaff and washing the grain to give to

A man driving a lonely truck through quiet, unmarked earthen country, passing

Women already up, wrapping their hair in buns for work and

Men driving dilapidated trucks toward the city, finally arriving to

A fresh buoyant boy loading packs of the grain into processing racks getting

Packaged, prepared, and presented as bread with a name, a description, a category.

And the happy clerk clanking opening the cash register as I coyly browse brainwash magazines

Before he gives me change, bread, a goodbye–to which I wander home and eat up, to give me the energy, the muster, to smile.








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