fuck, poetry, fuck

Purple sky bleeds on the rye, this is America, the Midwest; A sign flickers, neon print asking WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE?

I drove past the strip malls, cardboard props on the side of the road; behind each one is a Waste Land, T.S. Eliot’s sad, lonely tooth growing from an Unreal City: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”

They built us a sunset, ugly pink apartments that bubbled over John Wayne’s bones like cancer. We rode our bikes in circles while the voices on TV told us to eat, starve, grow up and stay young forever. You left, and I chained myself to the desert with stalks of rye. The world shrunk into my rib cage. My protein turned to pavement; a Culdisac carved my clavicle. When our cars passed on the freeway, you didn’t know me.

Alone in California, you cut your hair and read The Waste Land. You wrote your biography as I balanced seratonine like I knew the meaning of the word pronounced by the british-hindi doctor they paid for. The night I took the pills, we were listening to the same song.

When the music stopped I drove past the strip malls to the field with the sign that left scars on my eyelids. I saw you on the opposite shore, face white in a sea of rye. You knew me, in a passing car of a moment that smeared the sky with an eternal, noiseless question:

What the fuck have you done?