Hope is

Hope is the most sinister of addictions.

Taste the elixir of safety on the tongue

Bubbles of might populate space taken

To be outside the normalized confines

A man rests child pose on beige carpet

Head to floor facing away from the computer screen

As his American god

No answers in the digital scrolls

The patient agony of expectation

For letters to materialize form the ethereal witchcraft

Of a specified other human’s choice to type

And alter the dreams of another human being

There is a parceled swallow of routine

Disrupted by the hope fuming its way into the parlors of thought

Rumbling down potholed streets like a Sewerage and Water Board truck

Finally coming to fix the leaks

The dare not speaks

The iced over roots of stumped trees

The warnings of best be this way as not to arouse suspicions

Of what it means to be a human wary of hope

The ecstasy and the foul bilateral pinch of the abdomen

Clenching the human form inward to recognize

The silence will remain unbroken

The stasis of this predicament ossifies

Tongue glides across implanted teeth

Stung anxious blood burns in forearms of matted hair

The urge for an adult to rationalize verbal release or tears

Or some representation of the disappointment exceeds the outer expression

For the addiction of a cumulative deficit

The pull toward hope is commensurate with hope’s unclimactic compensation

The musicality is an opera of indifference

Hummed between coronary beats, the pause in the lub dub

The stare outward into the nothing to explain

The did not start, the horror of might, the hope in the getting hopes up

The cliched acrobatics of peppered positive reinforcement

Into the ears of a human trained to second guess every decision

As no path in the labyrinth begets blood flow

The same pale moon and cold hard ground

The torn sheet and numb gaze across the horizon

The seafarer’s mirage hazy hope and full of terrors