Breathing, Or Not, and All the Living and Dying in the Year of Our Lord, 2020

The entire world stopped breathing
when we learned that the minuscule molecules of saliva can kill us.

Repentance is kinetic redirection,
stops us in our tracks. Get out of your neighborhood
and go a new way.

Shop at the bodega, sip a horchata, and sway a little.

Experience a rebirth of your imagination.

“Whenever a person dies a library is burned,”
speaks the Sengalase people.
All those stories lived inside.

Breathe in something new... a lexicon and a blooming lily pad. Flower anew.

You can spin the story or beautify it in all its brutality. Narrative forms our minds.

Pause. Receive your story.

Don’t close the book even when it makes you squirm. Drop the defensive and breathe again...
if you can.

Breathing isn’t convenient, just like the fireworks at midnight... every night.

Don’t blow up.
Breath again...
if you can.

It could be a mask or a knee or a ventilator and it’s the year 2020 AD and none of us are free.
Breathe again... if you can.

And yet, you need the breath of another and you need their germs and life and water. Be filled. Breathe again...
you can, with the breath of another.