It’s been a while since I put pen to paper
unwrapped myself from the comfort
(ably numb) zone of 3 AM phone calls
with men I met in bathroom stalls
ending in, I’ll be over soon
the goo of pink slime Mc-ick-nuggets
nougats of attention deficit
inciting Vines, tweets, and tinder swipe rights
& the wispy water vapor lines
Spelling W-H-Y each time I exhaled
& hoped every passerby would
hail my flannel-sheathed hipster vibe

I sigh in time with
the execution of my mind’s eye
because when you put chemical-laced
hot pockets on the chopping block
and Ovaltine on a guillotine
after learning it contains Carrageenan
a known carcinogen
others begin to visualize you as a party pooper
everything’s s u p e r d u p e r
being blinded by the flashing lights
and confetti stripes
shoving phallic-based fallacies
into our pallid pores

We beg for more fluoride
to keep our teeth pearly white
and our minds ripe to settle into
MK Ultra’s new age 3rd Reich
and then silently fall like the ashes
of Madagascar’s canopy of trees
and die off like 40% of our nation’s bees
in the past year alone

What a travesty
although shelves are still lined
with the lies of China’s honey
cute plastic teddy bears
with insides inciting fear
in the very chemists who made them
and the deep-pocketed men who paid them
huge piles of dough to keep
the truth from seeping through
although los muchachos pobres en Mexico
know a thing or two about how corporate greed
equates to more for me
1% and proud to be less for you
just build the wall and shoo away
from the land that used to belong to you

Signs read, CAUTION DEER XING
to increase human safety
but no other species ever gets fair warning
when we decide to let greed
paint our gray matter green
and start turning forests into one less location
to squeeze out rows of suburban homes
enclosed in white Pickett borders
*cue auto-tune orchestra of
classical wonder bread blues
but not immune to the rain of noxious chemical sprays
delivered by army print men
imprinted with the slogan, We Want YOU….
to do everything you can
to string more puppets into our troop
to do whatever we say
without questing our authority
or the monstrous reflection
that will stare back at you every day

We enjoy the greatest loop-de-loop ride
around a spinning rock
until our clocks abruptly stop
and we wish we could
hop, skip, and jump back
onto the hopscotch squares of youth
when the most crucial truths
we needed to know
were that the sky is blue
and your country loves you
so you should love it too

But over time I began to unwind the lies
and could no longer silence the cries
creeping up my broken wind pipe
the chimpanzees we apparently evolved from
attack the fortress of my mind
like a tower of bananas labeled GMO?
no…why ruin the show?!
Monsanto snickers as our nation grows sicker
and quicker to buy nutrient deficient goop
that tastes best nuked

And without a side of truth
the earth’s roots, limbs, and shoots
beg for liberation across fruited plains
terror in the soil reigns
a ghastly mix of more pesticides
than the tongue-tied FDA can recollect
I shake my head and count the crystallized tears
for our capsizing earth I have wept

Stress, fear, and lament drown me in a primordial soup
my eyelids droop as my emotions regroup
to find a way out of this maze
that is why I’m afraid to write
because the truth never comes out quite right
to those that have forfeited their sight
and slid their moral right under the suffocating rug
of blue, red and white
fifty stars, thirteen stripes, one question:

When will we take back our lives?