Breadcrumb Starvation
Borders don’t just bleed,
they gape like torn flesh,
arteries spilling hunger across maps
while Gaza’s streets rot under a sun
that burns like a cruel surgeon’s lamp.
Children scrape dust from their tongues,
their ribs like rusted cages,
counting crumbs as if each were
a heartbeat they could swallow whole.
Here, in the land of fat bellies and hollow souls,
we gorge on excess while fields choke.
Immigrant hands, once like tender roots,
are ripped out like veins from the earth,
thrown into cages where air sours,
where fear slicks the floor like bile,
and despair clings to walls
like mold feeding on the crusted sweat of prayers.
The stench of policy hangs heavy,
a metallic tang of iron bars and rotting hope
as the world scrolls past famine
like wiping blood from a cracked monitor screen,
pixelated agony flickering in silence.
Storefront sanctuaries hawk salvation shrink-wrapped,
expiration dates stamped like execution orders,
while window-dressed cardboard suggests cathedral safeguards
and soup lines stretch like funeral processions
for dignity already buried.
We measure worth in percentages,
the forgotten % swelling like a tumor,
a malignant truth festering under
the perfumed skin of power,
where mouths stuffed with gold,
chew freedom into gristle,
spitting it back as policy
that victims cringe at swallowing
the taste of ashen caked hate.
And at the end,
a circle of children with starve-plagued hands,
thin as shattered bird wings,
reach upward toward a trembling adult hand
passing on moldy bread
like the week’s ration of rotten promises.
Tomorrow’s kindness and mercy yet to be leavened
into a fermentation of warlord-chaos.
I had a dream last night that the population bomb finally explodes and the die off of human beings reaches into the billions from starvation, disease and dysentery from polluted water and food. Global warming each year takes away more and more of seasonal crops that have sustained the world population for the last eon–no more.
Ron