New Poetry


The Breakdown

It seemed ordinary enough, she
stood in line with the rest of us
waiting for her sandwich.
She seemed a little nervous,
she twitched a bit now and then,
but nothing too strange in that.
Yet something happened on the way
back to her car, she dropped
her sandwich and the other things
she carried and began to scream,
right there in the street. No one
was hurting her, nothing seemed
physically wrong. She just
stood and screamed, as if,
in an instant, every horrible thing
ever imagined had come true.
As if she were seeing all things
never meant to be seen.
It went on and on, her screaming,
the sound of it suddenly eternal.
We could only stand and stare, struck
with a kind of fearsome awe, and,
on some level almost
unmentionable, a kind of
understanding.

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