While you were deciding what brand of orange juice to buy for breakfast,
and whether it should have pulp or no pulp, a child in Uganda
would gladly have eaten the cuffs off your buttondown.
When a plane crashed into the World Trade Center, a woman
with red hair was standing on a building getting ready
to crash into the pavement from seven stories up.
She was just another death that day, and her suicide note
was a wing of flame bursting from the North Tower.
As a pair of lungs opens for the first time, another door closes
on the face of an undocumented immigrant
who was taught that human beings themselves can be crimes.
When Polaris shines its eyes directly down on earth,
another light somewhere else is going out
in the living room of a family that considers togetherness
to be eating frozen dinners in separate rooms of the house.
While you were busy throwing left hooks in Wii boxing,
a Guantanamo Bay detainee is being left hooked to the wall
dressed in nothing but shackles and his slowly
smearing sense of dignity and self-respect.
As the sky is caking on clouds like concealer, a teenage girl
in Chicago is selling her body to afford lipstick
to impress men who want to slice her shadow like kite strings
so they can be the only thing that follows her home.
While you were sleeping, someone else is dying,
and the explosions of the last stars behind their eyes
echo in your dreams like REM grenades.
Whenever a bride picks out her wedding dress,
a divorced couple kisses in front of their child
just to keep the secret hidden for one more night.
Seconds after you were born, someone somewhere in the universe
wished they hadn’t been.