Come Sunday

Come Sunday

Come Sunday

Americans do it; we do it.

Every time our eyelashes crackle
we run to the wash basin,
wear youth on our face;
the mirror on the wall is very peach pink.
We, our uncles and aunts,
are a generation not afraid of death.
We are not amused by it either.
We have bought a Paritosh Sen
and the entire interstate highway
to prove it. We eat the house cat.
         Come Sunday we get
sassy; lust for glass and ginger, pick stones
and sermons tossed from a passing ship;
we comb our hair straight down our chest.
We are the ramp
          for an entire horde
of stampeding suns.

We do it –
strangle the baby
when she’s not looking;
dig a hole in our necks
to suck the fire out
and our generation gets old and tired
like the signpost at the street corner.
We tell each other 
hair-split jokes
and Marilyn Monroe crumples
the dashboard of a banker’s
pale lunch-hour break.
His face a lump of slow jelly.