I have questions

I want to say
to them,
oh,
you care for this world?

I've learned this although
you have told me stories
of your cellular telephones
and computers
and the general trappings
of life in a privileged place,

and I say instead
Have you seen your home,
the familiar softness of
escaping wealth
in the midst
of a land
where
we live on the history of another?

Have you felt the solemn terror
that is uniquely ours?
Do you wake and talk too much
of what people should eat
while riding on roads built on the backs of the dead?

Have you seen the terrible
way that Europe
looks after a war?
Have you lost a pint of blood
for each million that we kill?
Have you seen your education
bent
on the back of a foreign
peasant?

Do you speak of how much better
it is
to eat vegetables grown close to home
when people starve?
Of the importance of bullshit nutrients
when two hours away
in the delta of the Mississippi
I have seen men and women
scratching life out of dirt?

Are you between money and
less money
and feel that fateful pinch amid
a life where you never choose
between enough food or a pair of shoes?

Can you spell the diseases
that kill more than our bombs?
Can you say that your life was anything
but pilfered clay fired in a kiln and made timeless?

I scream

You guilty fucking beast!
You savage swine of man or woman!
Can it be that you see nothing of the poison you give the air,
that coursing velvet licking your lips and footprints and hairstyles?
How have you breathed for so long and never been alive?