the bug carries me along the grime loosened floor boards of dilapidated tenements that would awaken when the lights extinguished to honor the gods of electricity in our pious sacrifice of safety for the twelve dollars it cost to keep a light burning in a cocoa frosted bulb that was as close to a barbecue as we could ever hope to be
and the muffled screams of the new born one floor down and three windows over would dance above the sirens and car horns to remind us of the infestation that was our fault for being poor; I would hear of her death before the ravenous journalists could hope
to win bread through her surrender to the city’s movable feast, gnawing
at the soft underbelly of dirt caked indigenous faces that eventually melded into one voice screaming at the sky for
sunlight and beaches and warm moist breezes that caressed the skin in a divine embrace that we left to somehow
make our lives better, or make them better for our children who are asked for identification to their land
to convalesce along the horizon that was their birthright and is now only seen in lines of poetry, commercial filler or as the wallpaper of electronic chains mining this natural resource-
my compadres all shift and moan behind me in a impromptu barbershop quintet of lying in awkward sleep
awaiting the judgment of one of their own to decide when they and we can smell the ocean air again, when they and we can feel cobblestone baked in the love of the sun
the sun god, who I can see shone off the back of that bug, almost out of sight, I tattoo my cheek with the markings on the bars to catch a glimpse of Apollo, marking time here as with stitches against my stained skin,
the guards will undoubtedly take my belt and shirt as they did my shoes, as payment for attempting to infiltrate humanity and their slice of beach, but time, time is mine,
I mark it with emotive fingers matching each day here with one of the past
perhaps, if I am lucky, they release me before the end and I will scurry, like brother bug, under the doors of this life to an endlessness
that will be my new beginning.
