The World

The world does not take place in the shower.
Though maybe her world does. The world is full
of snacks and smut, unheated basements, pain.
The world is full of places where there is no basement
or where basements are the world that you know and love.
The known world is notably not the world
in love, or loved while confessing state lines.
Let’s all agree that the state wields power.
Let’s all ignore from our sage mint showers. As a child,
I was scared of our grandma’s basement. Bad things
had and would have happened. A world replete
with bad things happening, repeating
themselves like a cotton rose. Our loved world
would love to be happy, would be happy to love
the smut, the sage. Then a man dies quiet and another dies
loud, a boy lies dead for more than four hours.
The world is not afraid to watch, is full
of carpeted reasons to wait. The world underground
is thorny, smells, and is much more loved
than the world we know. The world has wasted
a lot of water. Power is wasting the city sun.
Let’s all confess full on for the world, for ourselves
still wet with unknowable heat, that the world we
shower with lies, with snacks, is the whitest
world one can painfully know. Let us rise
as much in rhyme as at risk. Let us scare ourselves
with this world on loan, our world we eat
and love and shame.