Spit It Out
This is NOT a speculative poem!
Spit It Out I want this taste out of my mouth. I wake up with it. The news makes it worse. It tastes like dust and cinders. I can spit and rinse, spit and rinse, 3x day, after cheap meals bought on my (now missing) SNAP benefit but I can’t free my tongue from the particulates. It flavors everything- dry bitter vile. I can brush my teeth rinse and spit the mint froth, until it is laced with red, but it lingers on my palate. I can scrape my tongue with stainless steel arcs until it drips red onto the porcelain, sluices down the drain, pink-edged red ribbons in thick saliva, but the taste of sick remains- I cannot wash this taste perversion from my mouth, the ever-toxic words The world is poisoned. Read the headlines. Avoid armchair commentators, with their one-minutes of hate and insanity crashing out all around like artillery shells. Language is a virus and we’ve still not learned to cover mouths when we cough or still wash our pathogen-filled hands that write properly. Rage and fear pandemics spread. I cannot rinse and spit out the unchosen circumstances of my birth, my wonky broken genes, my culture, my mother tongue, my expired passport and the infernal infection of hope. I can only fear death. Blooming like algae, History merely repeats, learns new dumb tricks. Rinse and spit.




You sum up so much of what many of us... most of us... are feeling right now. Sharp, like a razor cutting away the fat.
This definitely speaks for me.
Such a visually powerful piece.