Free radicals

will destroy your DNA

and oxygen from

the atmosphere

will feed the process

but

Please, focus on this

there are poetics

pumping from the

pulmonary valve to the

edge of your fingertips, but

these ideas do not

supply gas money

until week’s end

or a reason to the landlord

but only food for

insight into why your hands

are stained in ink

a free radical

will destroy your DNA

in other words,

you are a poet

and your DNA is

the low-income life

styled by genetics;

a free radical

destroying yourself

for an art that

is to be dead

and you are dying and

buried in the ground

and a poet

because you breathe oxygen

A living text that

speaks to the

young optimist

with like DNA

But, please, focus

because you are learning

the ways of a dead living

~Hayley Durham