Mob Mentality

One foot on her stoop,
One key in the door,
Kitty poured fire engine red,
No-Parking paint, out from her insides,
She emptied herself onto the street
In front of thirty eight too-busy-bystanders,
And disturbed no one.

Her neighbors gossiped on the phone,
Cursed at black and white broadcasts,
Tucked children into sheets,
Kissed wives, washed their faces,
Flossed, and prayed to God,
While a twenty nine year girl was raped as she bled
From the cuts carved deep into her palms.

With the TV turned loud, with responsibility thin,
The neighborhood watch never gets rewound,
And the sugar cups left unshared sour and stagnate,
Neighbors, in-proximity strangers, can’t hear you scream.

Jane Doe: Revision

Into the cavernous confines of your hollow mind,
Into the echoing insides of your empty wallet,
The therapist, the reporter,
The watcher and I
Dig deep,

Trying to decipher
Any promising relation, potential association,
Any, if at all,
Possible connection
Between the eighteen years of breadcrumbs
Scattered and now, somehow,
And for some reason, forgotten.

On the TV, they rumor.
They speculate.
They think
You seem like that kinda girl,
The type they’ve seen before,
The type left
Alone
At night.

The Latch-Key-Kid-Special, they say.

Deserted too often,
Ignored too early.

If your father
Had been my father,
I can’t help but think
How mad he’d be
To see your hand-cut filthy bangs
Brush against my face.
He would agonize over
How and what I’d been eating,
How and where I’d been sleeping.

So I need to know.
You need to tell me.

What happened to your mother, Jane?
Your father too? Did they get a chance
To tell you what could happen
To a girl like you, to any Once-Upon-A-Time-Girl
Who, by chance, took an off-the-trail hike?
Did they take the time to warn you?
Take the time to tell you
About cross dressing wolves and poison apple romance?
Did she ever, even just once,
Tell you a story
About a girl
Named Gretel
Who found a nightmare waiting in the woods?

The networks
They think they know your name now,
Your first and your middle
And although both fall on ears equally unrecognized,
They repeat them just the same,
Overlapping and rushed,
One directly after another.

Hearing your name
That way
Makes me angry.
Makes it sound like
You’re in trouble,
And it’s all your fault.
Makes me worry that
Regardless of what you remember,
And what you don’t,
You will never be able to explain how one night you fell asleep on the street,
In the middle of Midtown, with no shoes and a dirty face, outside and cold,
Stretched out on pieces of cardboard, dreaming.

Conversation with a Stone

As he flags under the weight
Of the passing green bean casserole,
He twists his stroke-stricken tongue

He struggles to speak sentences,
To enunciate niceties, to stumble
Over syllables that refuse to sound.

Besieged by all the many things
He cannot do, he sputters, he spits.
He makes me wonder why he bothers.