community
We need more community. For chronic disease, it’s inevitable timing.
For poverty– the myth through storytelling used to devalue life.
For AIDS, for overdose too.
We need more community, the kind that accompanies;
selflessness, and non-judgmentalism. The kind of community
where compassion and non-judgmentalism may be acceptable
to those with the hardest traumas to overcome.
The chants of ancestors and their narratives, by the fireside.
We need more community for AIDS, and the ongoing deaths, clear
enough for progressives to see, although this isn’t a partisan issue.
No leveraging for personal gain, until community
seeps back into all corners of neglected towns and cities.
For overdose and AIDS, medications aren’t enough.
Community might be made stronger with poetry,
we may even become narcissistic in our growing narratives,
but we’d change society as we changed ourselves.
We’d change the relationship between providers and patients
We’d need providers to fit into community along with patients,
there’d be less ostracization and isolation,
people would still get paid, and contentedness and appreciation
validation through narrativization, communities to change this nation.
This dream: where conflict still abounds, but community insulates
and provides a home for all, where poetry
was all we ever needed to console chronic disease and growing old.
Where all human lives were gold, no more distractions could be sold.
