The Little Voices

Words irritate and caress me

Falling from those too hot lips

They sing like hot honey tea

But they sting like an angry bee

They keep saying

That all my sidewalk chalk days

Are over

That the dreams I keep

In that blue floral patterned pocket

I stitched like a secret

Into my sweat shirt

Will never come true

That my chain smoking brother

Won’t ever quit

Not even when his lungs turn

City street black

And he falls back back back

And he will sit in my mind

As a sick old man

Dragging a respirator filled

With yellow liquid around

And he will die the week after Easter

And that will be what my children

Remember him by

Not the so absorbed piano player

That doesn’t react

When you tap tap tap

His shoulder

And it takes

Five minutes

Just to get him to answer

“How much ice do you want?”

And I cant stand to listen to

All of this truth

So I just stay cooped up inside

Hopping its all a lie

And I stay all alone

Scared to move an inch

Till I’m a wrinkle in a

Dust filled house

With too many cats

And all those Rooster collored dreams

Didn’t rise with the sun

They stayed stashed with my photographs

In the whom of this house

Filled with spiders and mice

In its un-use

And someday I’ll go to the very back

In the corner

Behind the old chest

And the china set I never used

And take out all those dreams

I’ll wash them in the sink

Till they shine almost new

And I’ll slid them down my throat

And let them sit in my stomach

And I’ll wonder why I

Ever let these voices tell me off