The Starvation of the Lower Class

 

Living at the BOTTOM of the FOOD CHAINS here, translated…

Last Night’s Dreams Were Still, Colorless, Mottled, Incomplete

Broken, Like How Your Own Saliva Flew Out from Your Mouth When You’d Talked, Toward an

Erect, Fifty-Year-Old Brass Statue, Making Your Speech,

As You’re Too Worked Up, Dissatisfied & Wanting to Cry, You Feel that Immense Sense of Hunger

And Saw a Rice Ball, and Chinese Buns Falling Down, Then, You Woke in Shock

That Owl that’s Called All Through the Night Still Hadn’t

Caught a Mouse Yet

On This Mountain, There Were Still the Flying Squirrels, the Squirrels, Fighting for the Limited Resources of

Nuts and Fresh Leaves, and, Their Same Kinds are Also Calling Out, in Search of Mates, They Settled

Between the Owls and the Bats, Between the Maples and Sycamores

 

Becomg Half a Bird, with Their Legs Clenched Tight Together

 

Outside the Windows of This Old Apartment on the Mountains, the

 

Clouds visited from Time to Time

 

Like Toothbrushes, Brushing Up Against that Rusty White Mountainside

 

Don’t Matter Where I Lived, I’d Always Taken Along that Toothbrush

 

This Morn, as I Brushed, I Saw Some Blood

 

My Periodontal Disease was Back Again, This Rusty Bottom Half of My Life, Not Healthy at All

 

I’d Needed, to Keep Warning Myself, But, I saw, from Out of the Pipes Connecting to My Wash Basin

 

Crawled Out a Baby Roach, Washed Down with the Antiseptic Mouthwash

 

Climbed Back Up Again, This Blind and Stubborn Offspring of the Roach

 

I’d Left, for Only Just a Month, without the Food Remains from My Teeth Entering into the Drains

 

And He’d Climbed Back Up, Begging Me for Food

 

I Too, Was Trying to Make a Living, Although I’d Only Gone Half-Way

 

I’d Fought Really Hard, and Persisted on Not Taking the Handouts from Anybody Else, that, Was When I Got Sent Back Here Again

 

This Was a Pathology of Being a Clean and Neat Freak

 

Like in That Spotted Dream, the Feelings of Hunger Weren’t Real

 

Like How Shadows Kept Asking the Other Shadows, When, Do We, Really Get Warned of to Change Our Lifestyles

 

So, this, is someone, who’s on her/his way to change, but, there’s not enough of a catalyst, to make the narrator change yet, and so, the narrator is just going to, keep on living in this vicious cycle of her/his own same behaviors, getting STUCK toward the bottom, wanting to move up, but couldn’t, it’s, an AWFUL place to be in!