You Don’t Get To Know Us Here: an Abcedarius of Loneliness in America

Angles everywhere, our pictures
burst into smirking. You have to give
credit to the walls, so ivory, so
dull they bore the next door neighbor’s
even thatch of lawn, while yours yawns
fists of weeds. So much is disguised, a
guise of “fine” and “great” and “ok” in your
hello, and you know yours isn’t the only house
iced with doors that look like slammed exits.
Just have a look at all the fences, keen in their
keep aways, keep backs, keep outs, keeping
love at length, love that spills its foreign
mortar shells at low and consistent velocities.
Niceties make it hard to visit, we can’t be
open, look each other in the eyes. Are we
protecting the holes already blasted into our chests, their
quarries of guns and valentines? There is that poem by
Rukeyser that lives inside you, and anytime you
stand in a crowded superstore you want to
take a stranger’s hand in yours, link the
unforgiving seconds of your life to theirs, add
value among the shelves bricked against us all
with fat free crackers and ziplocks of terror,
x-treme white breads that make us dizzy and forgetful.
You don’t get to know us here, standing in our lines at the
zero hour, riddled by our unfilled and overflowing baskets.