Your Ruff Collar, My Millstone

We live under the heat dome. 

I see you across the barren parklet. 
You are eating bits of soft pink babies. 

Humid.

My hair wilts.  
Your curls frizz. 

I lick the hot sauce off my fingers. 
You yell that you are an arriviste. 

I scream that I was once part of the noblesse oblige and waved banderitas.

You warble an Edith Piaf song.
I huff gas out of a brown paper bag.

You sing two registers too low. 
My viscera gurgles. I pee my pants where I stand — mud puddles form around my feet. 

Tomorrow you will sign away your inalienable rights for a used 78 rpm record of “Thee Infanticide Blues.” 
I will strum The Hits of the Borscht Belt Songbook tonight on my ukulele.

The gloaming hour.

I leave a minute after you do. 

You to your elevator shaft. 
Me to my abandoned mine. 

Dark. Wasteland.

We may meet again next year.

“Trump is only the most visible symptom of a disease that has long been sickening the country’s blood — a rapidly metastasizing tumor of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance, and fear that we might as well go ahead and diagnose as terminal-stage capitalism.”

— Mark O’Connell / Notes from an Apocalypse