Another Day

I put my head on a watermelon stand

An old lady put it on the scale

She looked like my grandma

The salesman said, “Do you want me to cut it”

She said, "I live close by if it isn't fresh I can return it"

She knocked on my forehead,

and handed me to her ten-year-old grandson

He knocked on it again,

harking patiently

Despite all the juices, he shouted “It’s off”

So I had my head replaced with a bigger one

And I survived another day

I gave my head to the lady in the hair salon

She used cheap shampoo to clean it

"Close your eyes," she mumbled

I didn’t

I needed a reason to cry

In a black leather chair

In a shitty salon with pink walls

covered with pin-up girls.

I cried

While a stranger was rinsing the shampoo off my head,

without being annoyed by the sound of weeping

coming from the black leather chair

And I survived another day

In the ammunition store

I hung my head on a rusty iron nail

“Twenty-five cents is the price of one ballot”

said the old man

to another man wearing an ivory rosary in his left hand

and a big ugly tattoo covering his right hand.

The man bargained for 5 bullets at the price of 4

while pointing his gun toward the head on the wall.

Later on,

the man may use these bullets

He will need less time to use them than the time he needed to buy them

I was hanging there on the rusty nail, watching from afar

Without interfering

The man did not shoot

And I survived another day

On the side of the desert road

That is now reserved for the army

And for those who escaped the warzone

I buried my head beneath a mound of human feces

I heard the wail of the widows, and the bangs of the bullets

The border patrol ignored me, the relief trucks didn’t stop for me

I swallowed the sand

The desert cold bit me, the desert heat scorched me

I saw death harvesting souls, sparing others

a fence and some sand dunes separating us

I waved to death

“You’re on the other side,” he said

“The lucky side

"Where I don’t have the authority to choose destinies”

So I survived another day

I rested my head on the shoulder of the city

I didn’t spill the details of my day

I didn’t spread out my misery and grief

I mocked anything and everything

I told  thirty-some stories the city already knew

I told them all, one by one

When I was done, I could not sleep

But I survived another day

Maybe!