You see them on the streets

Inwardly crumpling bit by bit as they watch themselves fade into statistics

If eyes could make tally marks,  their skin is a canvas of pale desolation

White sheets, drawn and faded, with a smattering of features observing their bodies unwillingly be camouflaged

Their skin is hungry, rumbling to be touched and their eyes are pooling with ink bleeding into the edges and filling all they are

All that they aren’t

Whispering hymns and making statements in the silence

A cacophony of stillness to tell them their lonely.

 

We always look for loneliness in blackened corners, spread unwilling hands to check the darkness for lost souls

Determined to face what we fear and emerge heroes we approach the homeless man, the alcoholic, the widowed bride

In rushes of man made kindness we look for those with loneliness engraved in dark letters, spilling across their faces

Their wrists

And hurry by those frozen in patches of light

Isolated by their own anomynity

But not yet broken and therefor undeserving of heroism

This day and age kindness demands recognition

and since loneliness isn’t terminal  

we treat the side effects

we have changed the definition of kindness into warped synonyms of pity

and loneliness with its salty emptiness

and bitter after taste

lacks broken limbs and malfunctioning organs

to warrant enough pity to be kind

dressed up in silky blouses and four bedroom houses we cannot condescend loneliness enough to stipulate a cure

so we malnourish the thriving lonely, staving off attention

and let them watch their dusty bone fingers grab at thin air

fading between the cracks in our minds too flooded with irrelvevant words

 

if I could change anything I would change this

this loneliness

this biting ache that consumes you not in fire or passion but with cold disintegration

slow and quiet

stripping you of the luxury of words to accompany your dilapidated thoughts riddled with dementia

and neglecting to stain you with the blood and joy of others

unraveling threads and stories that make you alive as much as a beating heart

I would change how blatantly we banish those declared as weak because they are beginning to bend

And tend to those who have already broken

Like we can only save those who have already fallen through the grate of society

 

I hate that we walk by people with paper skin and bleeding eyes

Already told each day in the absence of sugary hellos and rich farewells 

or even simple pleasures of eyes meeting in small bursts of acknowledgement

That they are not worth it

 

I hate that we let them be lonely