Mental Sensibility Poem by Dakota Ellerton

I live to stare at the world through heavy eyes of brown and gold and copper, to see babies cling from their mothers’ breasts, whose bald stalky husbands come and go from the beer store, where a pennyless group of boys tune and sit, high and dazed in music they exhale, where wandering persons tread by dusk and dawn again.

To see men on stretchers in blue gowns, pleading in tongue to be released, nurses go by laughing on their way to the front desk, where a woman sits with her fourteen year old daughter, who shakes and shivers and vomits on the floors, where the thirty two year old janitor comes with his bucket and his mop and his endless suds, cleaning throw-up nightly to pay bills for medication, for a son whose stomach twists and knots and bends, leaving nothing but false hope he’ll make it to see ten.

To see children grow, only to fall to drugs and sex and money, led by feel and touch through loving abuse, by hands so dirty their mothers would tear and gag, quitting school to pay for a one bedroom apartment, to sleep on a soiled semen stained couch, begging for a meal, waking at five to walk to the YMCA to shower and clean, when the water bill gets too high, from money spent on LSD, to give the illusion things aren’t as they seem.

To experience war and love wrapped endlessly in tormenting displays of judgemental hate filled with lies and lies and lies and lies and lies. Such hopeless faith and trust clouding good sight of wrong and bad, decaying all purpose and need, of life, of truth, of pain. To learn suffering and betrayl the only ways acceptable to the flawed design of reailty, and mentality status’, in a society so demanding your dignity and pride could tarnish your name, as you do only what you believe to be better, under the most unjust of circumstances.

Oh, my eyes could shimmer and weep for the travesties in my hands, I could lay sleepless as my body sleeps leaving concious only my mind to walk and wander til four A.M., out of body, out of sight, I rest, slowly rotting through my dying organs, alcohol and tylenol blunty stab through my kidneys and liver and heart - my expressionless face lays still and sickly yellow, as I dream of growing tired.