Crushing

With a crushing weight on my chest
I enter the crematorium.

Faint moans and screams,
Gaunt women in threadbare cotton shifts,

Long diaphanous hair streaming behind
And a young blond man in full Nazi regalia giving chase.

Mouth open, drooling, his cold blue eyes sparkle.
Entranced! Bewitched! In love!

How do I even know you're here?
Here is a door but no other side

No grass, no birds
No kind or comforting words

Just cell phones and a mean looking mother—
His long legs privatizing the aisle.

A girl, about twenty-six months
Looks from face to face

Picking up the world they see—lonely—
On a bus full of people!

She looks; he won't return her gaze.
She pleads

and in her eyes now grows
His look of utter hate returned to him.

He looks for the door
But finds no other side.

With half a laugh to whom it may concern
Her mother laughs and says

"She's so intense!"
Hoping he isn't offended.

He isn't.
He's broken.

He wobbles to the exit
his heart like her heart

a chamber
with a door

and a world
inside it struggling

unprepared
as the rest of us.


© Dan Goorevitch, 2001