This diner has a lot of windows,
the sun creeps onto the table where
I write, splashing into my eyes.
Too much sun always bothered me,
like Meursault in The Stranger,
who knows where this could lead?
A pop song plays, a female vocalist,
some chatter around me, a women gasps
at some news she’s been told.
I look out the window at a group of clouds,
everything temporarily gray, a smokestack
belches white into the December sky
and a lone student walks across a school yard parking lot.
And I think of the people I know,
some of them almost strangers to me now,
the ones who cling to a false
narrative of a democracy that hides
the lies better than the other side,
the ones who avoid any conversation
of genocide by sticking to corporate news,
like ostriches with their heads in the sand.
A car drives by in a blur, then another
and I’m out the window again,
imaging something better,
something with teeth, something real,
and the sun hits me again and I type
the next line blindly.