Opportunity

Tremble with a bated breath, and maybe fifty or a hundred years from now, we’ll be able to accept this, if she can just keep sucking in the oxygen and running, running, running for the answers as if seeking the end of a sentence that never comes to save her because she didn’t have faith and couldn’t give into the kind of person we demanded she be when she’s in this part of town, country, and patriotism, waving that flag like a battle cry of identity because she has nothing left that she can call her own–including herself–and we’re not talking about virginity or purity because both those things and all related subjects are a farce, but she’s going to stand like Cesaire’s peasant, legs spread wide, pissing out a hot stream of urine into the dirt beneath her, mixing in the soil, until we listen to the knocking of her heart, to the beating of her breath, to the breaking of her chest as it demands a second chance to be heard again, to be born again because we could never have hoped to be born right the first time in a world that’s already given up on ideals and shaped us into exactly what it wants us to be as we drown in the hourglass-shape of an exotic bottle of whiskey that cost only as much as a poor boy’s life and a little girl’s dreams and our insistence on innocence because we prize it over everything except self-gratification, of course, but let me tell you that darkness is a frightening place, and I think it’s just a little much to expect for us to–but wait, there’s a knock, knock, knock, and I will…