The
Death Historian
They found them slumped in their
cars en route to the ER.
They found them in apartments od'd
and self-harmed,
in the ICU with chests cracked open
by machines,
tubes ferried down throats on fire.
Some lie in comas. Some lose a limb.
And the nurse clasps their hands so
they don't die alone.
There are sirens keening. The
morgue is overflowing.
There are bodies stacked in
refrigerated trucks,
that mirror facing us and the
threat of silence,
too much to bear on our own.
We cower-in-place, too frightened
to breathe
the less-polluted air.
And the bus driver gets spit upon.
And the store clerk risks her life,
so we can hoard paper
to wipe our behinds with.
There is a new protocol for touch.
There is a circle of suffocating
light in the jail cell.
The corona atop an ICE skull glows
in its cage.
And that dead ER doctor had seen
enough so the hospital
corridors are hushed and there is a
harp's Amazing Grace.
And this was meant for the old (like
you, Grandma),
and the black and the brown, and they
are beating Southeast Asians
in the street, calling them by Chinese
names
and I buy Mr. Chen's fried rice
weekly to atone
and resist the call to inhumanity.
Truth tellers lose their jobs. Only
the lies of MBAs suffice.
The world is going blind to the
hysteria of the grieving poor,
rent now months overdue and no
grace, no grace for you.
And Navajo Nation is ravaged again.
And Canada won't open
its border. And Mexico is shut down
too. This is the shithole country.
You can't get a passport now to
save your life.
And the bomber plane crashes into a
neighbor's house.
Georgia cooks the books and sends the
nonessential
essentials into orange virus death.
"Throw Grandma from the train"
and into the flames
of Wall Street's oven. Work Will Set You Free
coming from the mouths of Bergen-Belsen
and soul-snatchers everywhere.
They clamor for opening not the
heart, but the death box.
Open and re-open they bray, hollering
for more death
as long as it is not their own.
And we rush into the hair salon. Crowd
into the barbershop
and get infected 100 times more. And
there's no parade for the dead
even though body bags lie in state
at the White House gate.
And the number is always an
undercount in this necropolis.
But the helpers rose to cancel the
metallic haze hovering over our cities,
plasticized water, sleeping in the
elements, charity drives for the cost
of wellness, the millennial
nightmare of debt and never-ending catastrophe.
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