Something Nobody Will Want To Read

You have only to look around you and you’ll see
blood being spilled, in the most playful way,
just as if it were champagne.
-Dostoyevsky 1864

We can’t afford to stay warm.
Christmas lights strung around the porch
and across the buffet and above the cupboard
lift the spirit but don’t give off warmth.
The register beside my chair with a wee amount of heat
is all I have
and a feeling like broken glass.

I broke the votive candleholder
into a million pieces
Blood red shards of glass
scatter across the floor
and fly under the piano.
Now they’re embedded in the tongue and grove
of a hand-laid floor
(my father on his knees
when he was young).
A feeling like that.

We’re weighed down in a wasteland of war—
scavenger of commodity.
Libraries languish and roads crumble,
and children go without textbooks
so we can spill blood like champagne
and march in step.
Flags wave grandly from gated communities
and likewise weakly from a doorjamb
in front of the hovel without heat
for heroes in uniforms
with flags sewn on backwards.
A feeling like that.