I know about this asshole who comes into
the cafeteria and turns up the volume to tortuous
levels on the TV decrepitly showing CNN,

with complete disregard for my peaceful reading,
and the bottoms of my soul start to scream in agony,
as he dips his face two inches above his slop,

comes up halfway with rafts of food sticking out,
chewing madly, allowing his eyebrows to raise
high on his evil face to show how very serious

he is about absorbing the molasses spewed
by the cranky anchor who thinks she is god
or number one, perhaps best entertainer on earth,

and then my stomach turns in revolt with my soul.
But I stop, looking at the rusted brass pea green
building on the edge of the view out the south window,

see myself as a judgmental pig, wondering who it is
who has allowed me to live so long in a broken
bucket of worldly chaos, the kind that was meant

to send me flying, or flopping, out a window
on my seventeenth floor, screaming, wanting

the anchor’s god to scoop me up and fill all the empty
spots with shit that invisibly occupies the air, making
me complete in the unworldly, scolded rag of my mind.

.