Flower Bed

The stench of death
lingers longer
than an inhaling flower,
rigor mortus lays stiffer
then a stem
rooted in concrete,
bluish skin wilts
as each petal
is blown down
under the ground.

Mental Health

Crazy
used to be just for us,
a little tribe
lined up outside
of self-medicated
pharmacies and
psychiatrist’s offices,
imprisoned inside
padded wards,
dressed in our finest
straightjackets,
suffering endlessly
from PTSD, anxiety,
traumatic tragedies
and childhoods
of violence and silence,
and every memory
of the past repressed,
as the average person
used to leer at us,
keeping one eye
staring out of the corner
of their heads,
wondering,
“What’s wrong with them?”

But the formerly sane
finally realized
that the whole world
has gone mad,
so they assume
they don’t need a ticket
to stowaway on
the crazy train,
as we welcome them,
“All aboard!”
with one eye
staring out of the corner
of our minds,
wondering,
“What’s wrong with them
now?”

Standing in the Slaughterhouse Checkout Line

Our tastebuds have evolved from craving milk straight from the teet, meat that once breathed and plants growing wildly in every backyard,
to GMO’s grown in a laboratory, broken bread with no carbohydrates, eggs aborted from an assembly line uterus and faux tofu animals birthed in a test tube.
No longer do we crave sugar cane sweets and savory salts, but tasteless paste, high fructose corn syrup and Dead Sea saline.
Choking down vital vitamins and mineral pellets, supplements sustaining us with enough sustenance until the next artificially sweetened fruit smoothie,
when indigestion, constipation, diarrhea, diarrhoea, turistas and Montezuma’s Revenge cause popping colorectal polyps and gastrointestinal spirals to expel noxious greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

We wouldn’t know good food
if it ate us.