kitchen corner of a basement bachelor suite, there's a certain search for certainty,

you know we'll never see her

S touch her childhood home in photos that she took. it's one more omission from a

highschool history book; how whole lives are knifed and pushed aside. to whom it may

concern...this is to inform...yours, sincerly yours... there's a bus that's leaving

half an hour from now. it won't take her where she really wants to go. so she sits

there with her luggage at her side. in the empty stations of our empty lives. take a

broken bottle, take a rafter beam, or take a needle and a tarnished spoon. all just

words to kill off one more unheard statement in another dying afternoon; she says

she's leaving soon. so so long to ten hour shifts and faking sympathies. farewell to

piles of bills, unpaid utilities. all rolled up and unfurled like a flag. wake up and

pack your bag... "it's like being sick all the time, i think, coming

Home from work, sick in that low-grade continuous way that makes you forget what

it's like to be well. we have never in our lives known what it is to be well. what

if i were coming home, i think, from doing work that i loved and that was for us

all, what if i looked at the houses and the air and the streets, knowing they were

in accord, not set against us, what if we knew the powers of this country moved to

provide for us and for all people, how would that be, how would we feel and think

and what would we create?"