American Dream

The walls dripped with thick, flowing curtains of a mentalist nature.
There, the white tiled floor receives my steps, and the walls seep and ooze into me,
their psychic sponge, they've been waiting for me today.
A thousand cardboard cut outs and an individual corner of sky
takes it all in.
There is a child in a photograph - shoeless, dressed in dark, rough fabrics
posed yet completely natural. Ruled by his poverty, but not ruled as we are
by the misfiring pistons in our brains which developed themselves so unruly
with satisfaction and selfishness and that horrible thing---entitlement.
his face did not know it, and if he ever knew comfort later in his one true life,
dirt on his skin, staring up with unfettered childhood at the ice cream man,
a tough old slav in a butcher's white cap, his metallic grey of warm milk
the only sweet solace in this child's manifest destiny days,
he did not learn this thing called complacency.  His hands slowed, and women
wrote letters about him, doted and cared as much as their leisurely lives
would allow, in their husband's shadow...this little boy stepped outside of that.
Existed after the fall, and before the flood.
He beams, not a hope in the world, and yet no tightness bearing down on him,
he and the others all lined up like leaves on a tree which placed them here,
caught in this time - their manner, their faces and features look
adult-like...their lack of dependency ruling over my shattered steps, as I
walk past them, their eyes follow me with more of a rounded soul than any who grab at the air
all around me could ever dream up for themselves.
He looks up at that big, strong and menacing man with the jug of warm milk,
and he is there, in that moment, with beatitude, like nothing else we could ever know
or taste again.  It died with them, and their bones take their goodness with them
in the dirt left on our expensive, ridiculous shoes.

M. Lucia