What More Am I

The glamour of their squalor is found in specular highlights of crisp brown eyes peering through mud-matted hair, crying. Weeks of eating an abundance of whatever, which consisted of scarcely more than bugs fished from non-potable cesspools. A decade seems a long time, until singularly it accounts for one’s whole life…and yet we won’t home them, because they are a plague. Self-righteousness cannot bear the reminder that “refugees” might be people…children even; running from nightmares that persist in daylight. Ignorance is bliss, after all… and who chooses to come down from a high? We have full tables, full inns, and empty hearts. Opportunistic politicians see a platform, borne on the backs of the starving and desperate, they manifest feigned outrage and farcical hand-wringing. Droves follow droves out from the gloomy dread greeted by cool apathy or worse; outright derision… what more is to be expected of humanity? The squalor of our glamour is found in hopeless disconnection to what matters, or to the reality that we could have been them. 11/18/15