Back There

They’s killin’ babies back there.
I can hear’em plain as day,
but no one’s noticin’
and I guess I best don’t neither.

Then I’m next in the coffee shop line,
last outta the rain, with no more
than a cuppa coffee
and a smoke on my mind.

Been walkin’ three days straight,
those voices, dead and damned,
not far behind, not far at all.

They ain’t dyin’ for nuttin’,
no matter what I’m spose to believe.
And I ain’t the one’s killin’em either,
not me, no way siree. Keepin’ m’nose clean,
mindin’ my own, like the doctors say to.

Just can’t get’em out, is all.
“Get Out!”, I’m tellin’em, but they won’t
let me alone! Those poor kids screamin’,
screamin’ like there’s no t’morrow.

And me, my mouth full of horrors
just itchin’ to be let out, set free.
One endless blood-curtlin’ cry
‘til my lungs collapse into themselves.

No easy answers, say the doctors
in their glass-tower offices
with their pressed suits and pressed hair.
It all takes time, they say. It all
takes time.

And I think, “But what about those kids,
what about them?”

Then I wonder, “Maybe they know sumtin’.
Maybe there’s more.”

Outside, a streetcar all red
and screechin’ iron passes.

I look up into each window, my hands
graspin’ the cold formica countertop,

and in their reflections
I see a bloated, angry sky
Watchin’.