The poet writes this tonight at 2 AM, while listening to menacing electric noises and breathing hexavalent chromium.

*****

Recorded Reading (1:56): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/tb0ewo072gyei5baier2m/End-of-Compassion.mp3?rlkey=dbuw98y6dipbcq9nyyt33fv14&dl=0

*****

End of Compassion

May you shrivel like the animals
That you’ve put to fire
That’s become priority
In my true desire

May you hear, first thing each day
And last thing every night,
Sounds which will remind you
You must live in fright

May nobody listen
When you protest your innocence ~
Innocence, to you, has been
No part of anyone’s defense

May you drink your poisoned water
May you eat your poisoned food
May you see destruction of
All you know as good

When you go into a store
May you, like me, see
Every clerk and salesman
Look at you suspiciously

May you by the kiss of steel
Be agonizing touched
Like those truck and crane drivers
Your vandalisms crushed

May you look at ugliness
That’s what you like to see
All around you, just the same
As your roadway litter be

May you find disintegrated
All of your designs
Looking like your pushed over
And your removed roadsigns

May you be just like the people
Going by just there
Whom you have driven crazy
Talking to the empty air

Stopping traffic, asking strangers
To please call a cop
With both hands covering their ears
Crying, “Make it stop!”

May you breath the poison air
You blow in to me
And may somebody else rejoice
That nobody can see

May you live in certainty
That in any case
If I could, I would push
A shovel through your face

*****

This poet presently lives at a fraction of her nation’s poverty level.

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