How many of us —
sick as bees,
ill defenders of our rumpled peace,
remotely disordered dancers on the edge
of our doctors’ scalpels —
how many of us there must be
who’ve learned to take our diseases as
strictly personal, all our own doing;
how many there must be
who cannot see how we
are obvious medals
on a bad society’s lapels.
No one wants us to know —
they tell us to hide
and drug us into exile —
they paint us into
suicide corners
and fictionalize us into
television monsters —
they keep us from each other —
because of
what we could tell
them about themselves
and how we got here
with their help, with their
God’s help, with their
permission and
their need for us —
first as
steam valves
hissing off pressure,
then as
spillways for their junk,
finally as
scapegoats turned loose
in their parched deserts
to ramble.
Don’t we ramble, though;
don’t we wander
outside their walls.
Their walls that
hold them in so
tightly. We might be sick
but we’re free. It counts
for something
as long as they don’t kill us
while discounting it.
