Sylvia Sharpentier

There was an armless man biking on an empty street,
When the bell tolled at the midnight hour.
Between the emaciated ribs had stench diabolical
Everyone called him crazy.
A phantom of the city, he is. Perhaps, death himself.
A trail of breath. Ragged bandages barely hid his nakedness.  
Burnt was his hollow eye. Disfigured was his nose.
Like a disgraced soldier refusing to come home
The boy know only twelve springs!

Through a broken glass window of a beat-up car
Saw three whisperers an army of fanatics of midnight chase,
Blaring red and no blue.
“Why y’all here, brother?”
“Innocence. Innocence only”
They ain’t here to catch us. Too many. They are here to kill us.
Bullet holes on the car doors, motionless organic bodies
Blood on the concrete and
Silence, after all!

A foreign couple walked on the street.
BAMM! The fallen! A suicide!
No, it was the poor armless boy!
Help! For God’s sake, Help!
Curtains closed, yellow rooms unlit  
And nobody gave a single goddamn look.