center

The prisoners were dragged to their knees, positioned to face the street. Car 1’s high beams lit their faces. They squinted away in discomfort. And one by one, the men from Car 1 came up and abused them.

Neighbors peeked from blue curtains
Buzz or howl at the elevator,
Silver button pushed, gliding doors opened.
Tammy walked her way in.

    Cutting  through  dense
deep   dark             pit  black  room
wail.   Howl.           A  piteously sobbing
wall
suddenly          come  alive.

You are a rotely opinion-headed zeitgeister—
already diagnosed and hooked up
to the slow death of a dystopiclly present
despot's di(e)ialysis machine 
creating simulacric smackstackey musings

Who just sit around
Bored with their own
Company & can’t get
Their head around someone

I don’t even know how to take care of myself and my throat hardens and there’s a blue whale swimming in my chest and the water flows from my eyes.

Grassfires accented the hot season
but we were always safe:
a dirt road between the cinder block wall
and the grassland’s edge
served as our moat of solid ground

I cannot walk the park and miss its crop of needles. I cannot reach for fish behind glass without scales impaling my wrists. Those trees I admired, the ones syringe-like in winter. Yes, needles.

You’re not evolving. At all. Steve Jobs gave you an iPhone maybe, and yet cancer took him away. Your technology changes here and there, but you, as creatures, do not.

Can you love zero?     Can you camp in a swing?
            Can you change your ‘state’?    to massive
missile attack drone    saying, take precautions
            extra ones, even uneven          lethal nonlethal netting