Your mouth is always open
The world is spinning
So many barriers to your happiness
Such frustrations in your work
So endless the delays of your bank
In sending all your thousands of dollars home
Delays as endless as your indignation
At the whirling kaleidoscopic chaos
Of this land so new to you
Whose newness is its crime
And whose traditions equally criminal
While all about you mill
Dark people
With features askew
And frightening scars
In ill-fitting clothes
Who hail from unimaginable places
That you’ve never heard of
Or maybe heard of but never seen
Or maybe seen but never experienced
For if you had experience
Your mouth would be closed
And your world would stop spinning
And your eyes would glisten
Like the eyes of the diseased
Emaciated people whose children they are
People who are waiting for them
In less privileged folds of the map
Where frustration is real
And frustration means death
Death by starvation
Death by boot heel
Death by nonexistence
Who know horror
As a daily dinner guest
That strokes the heads of their children
And owns all the windows they are permitted to look through
People who live in places where the only thing you own is your hunger and your fear
People who pray for fifty dollars a month
So they can survive
Without selling their daughters
Or mutilating their children
To earn money with their hands out
From people like you
Who pay fifty dollars for a meal at a restaurant
With more waiters than customers
And utter every syllable in dismay
At your lot in life
