Such Whiteness

Be as miserable as the cavities that lurk behind your pristine white washed teeth and the ancestral secrets that they keep

It’s not enough to just brush but the blood that tarnishes your sink when you floss is too harsh under the fluorescent bulbs in your rent-stabilized home that before you has never known such whiteness

You wave to the right strangers on the street the ones that seem innocent enough

The brown babies who often blush when you wiggle your fingers in their direction

You eat and you eat ignoring the small pain that is ever present

Silence the misery beholden to you and to me

You’ve woken up again and again in the middle of the night to the loud neighborhood kids either in the middle of a celebration or a fight

So unlike the sidewalks in your suburban hometown that as your dad would say got rolled up at night

Strange to be a stranger when your bank account says this is exactly where you belong

Flick your tongue out of habit to the back of your mouth

Fall back asleep and awake to the streets

that never went to sleep

the lingering taste of iron in your mouth

You shower and wash it out

Let the misery overflow and overfill the cup you’ve been told must only hold the happiness and innocence of childhood summers when school felt years away and the sun didn’t set until you were already tucked into bed

Be as miserable as the sky is on days when there is no universe

Just hell on Earth