Lowering Your Standards for Food Stamps

Words fall out of my coat pocket, soak in bleach water. I touch everyone’s dirty dollars. Maslow’s got everything on me. Fourteen hours on my feet. No breaks. No smokes or lunch. Blank-eyed movements: trash bags, coffee burner, fingers numb. I am hourly protestations and false smiles. The clock clicks its slow slowing. Faces blur in a stream of  hurried soccer games, sunlight, and church certainty. I have no poem to carry, no material illusions. Cola spilled on hands, so sticky fingered, I’m far from poems. I’d write of politicians, refineries, and a border’s barbed wire, but I am unlearning America’s languages with a mop. In a summer-hot red polyester top, I sell lotto tickets. Cars wait for gas billowing black. Killing time has new meaning. A jackhammer breaks apart a life. The slow globe spirals, and at night black space has me dizzy. Visionaries off their meds and wacked out meth heads sing to me. A panicky fear of robbery and humiliation drips with my sweat. Words some say are weeping twilight and sunrise. I am drawn to dramas, the couple arguing, the man headbutting his wife in the parking lot. 911: no metered aubade, and nobody but myself to blame.