High school inmates waiting for a bus flick ashes
to the sidewalk not knowing there will be
more ashes in their lifetime than they can smear
outside unemployment offices, kitchens where they will
wash dishes, do anything to escape being told what to do,
outside funeral parlors where candles light up the deceased,
on the floors of jeeps on roads to battlefields,
on groggy mornings when they wake to find dreams
stubbed into half eaten slices of last night’s pizza,
the ashtrays of the young and hopeful before them who
have tried to jive and laugh away their fears
Their fathers ejected butts on caddy shack floors,
flicked them into the dark outside boxing gyms,
into toilets, in defiance of nuns, snitches, preachers
who warned them they would have hell to pay,
for playing with fire and smoke and truth
Their mothers too, once off the bus, exhaled upward
into the jubilant air, dawdling the short distance
to staid and staged living rooms, to middle age,
burned holes through satin dresses after proms,
exhaled downward through their noses
into the fresh skin of their cleavage not knowing
the price they would pay for being themselves
No need to preach damnation to the children of ashes
They will dump their own on the asphalt
of parking lots outside shopping malls
as their parents and teachers and holy men did,
find new ways to crush them underfoot and curse
the relentless cycle of the mundane
