Mall of America

everything outside the shopping mall is death.

inside, the commercial flooring would be spotless

if not for my bloody corpse in the atrium

splayed out across the ground in front of the up escalator.

as chance would have it

one of my eyeballs has rolled just far enough

to see one of yours, a great lake of tranquility. or cold black ice i should have known,

that my heart would just pump through for you.

look at me now, a bloody snafu

satirizing the meaning of life phasing in and out of existence,

there is no sensitivity in what i have become.

my limbs grind like clockwork inside the escalator system that delivers

nothing but my body reemerging

from its mystery loop with a hundred pieces of seething flesh, my flesh. i assure you

that there is nobody more delicious than me,

for i am the umami of america: bitter, sour, and salty.

i am a delusion that is small and weak

and coming for you from the eighteenth floor of hell. you won’t believe it

right now but someday i will be big and strong

enough to grind against the whirr of the system, someday

the geography on which i stand will compare you superior,

and someday you’ll realize that you’ve been a zombie since before i ever was.

but for now as my corpse throbs to the beat of

freedom, i’ll have you know that i ain’t part of your system. come here and

shake me and i will be the caricature of what you did.