GROVELING

by Kyrsten Bean

I’m tired
working hard for money
I don’t ever seem to get

Working and living in boxes
selling commodities
we are the commodities

We are robots and
ciphers our
empty-hole heads used to
fill the space in our mouths
Tilling the cash and the register
grovel, grovel, groveling forward
on scraped knees

The gravel is our
hallowed sustenance
drama our lucidity, we are
tossed amongst the debris
privy to the secrets of youth
wasted on the insouciant
insatiable
wise in their eyes
but not their years

We are
another bistro selling hamburgers
for a dollar
late at night when

You have nowhere else to eat

STAID LIFE

by Kyrsten Bean

I’m hungry for more
than a without life can prescribe me
I’ve lost hope of finding any relief in copacetic substances
years I’ve spent, slowly stacking the Lego pieces of my pillaged
nervous system back together, I’m
left to wander these slum flats, little box houses slung below the
hilltops, pieces of paradise sorted only amongst those who live on the
very tip-top--they drink, clink, clinking their little crystal
glasses, I fancy they have nary a care, drink as they wish, snort
lines of white rails, grow wings and flit up banisters to tuck in
their angel-faced kids
whose colleges are already paid for. But what do I know
I’m a former pill junkie, bereft of pills, left with the pick-pocked
face of age,
whittled-down rage, a spent carcass lost in a staid life, pointing my
finger up, up, up,
shaking it ineffectually,
still begging for change.