Alphabet

Alphabet

A warped mind suggests a needed fix.

I’ve never done heroin.

Heroin is an outright lie.

It leaves the brain possessed

with nothing but relief

and the need for more.

There is a person, much like the world,

who is balanced by a hinge of hostility

mixed with fear.

This person, unlike the world,

can rearrange the alphabet

to form statements of goodwill,

finding peace in the last words

of yes you can.

Most of the world wishes it could find peace

this easily, merging alphabets into a neutral language

that addresses the chef in Afghanistan

and the banker in Detroit.

It is complicated.

Not to the seven-year-old

who holds her hand out to touch

the twilight of the sky,

but to the thirty-year-old

who has lost his child

to a lying ex claiming

he is addicted to heroin

when the truth is he’s

been free from its clutches

for six years.

If we only knew what exactly to fix,

maybe we could walk away solaced

and hang despair in the middle of the string

pulled taught between two cans.

Then we could hear.

It would not be too loud

as a child’s toy phone

is nothing if not magical.