Fighting over freedom we don't even give ourselves

 I write poems on old paper reminiscing
how I use to love writing on new paper
reminding myself that I was always spoiled.

In this living, we never cherish anything.
Our shoes, about six months are thrown out
somewhere in the ghetto sidewalks.
Our clothes, smell of only asphalt
where we were last sitting outside
watching satellite stars.

I tell you
living here too long has me far gone
from the earth, and what is freedom.
I ask you
how much is your love worth
and can I buy myself into happiness.

You say
if I need a price then it is what is
killing me, tainting my thoughts
into thinking it is what I need now.

How strange,
that most things have left me
when I grew up out of teenage dreaming.

In this poverty, the importance remains
the simple everyday, the knowing who I am,
the moments that we share without spending.

If we need a three course meal, a gift,
an expensive gas trip on mother's day,
are we satisfying our mothers or corporations?

I tell you, this living has us thinking we are
two the same depending on spending to be
beloved.

I can only see us growing in this insanity
watching mirrored reflections and yet
feeling like were missing something
before we feel this beautiful.

So I am in this living room, amidst the calm
of piano notes and the static radio
while others enter screaming, always in a hurry,

and the city outside approaching placing more
pricetags in this monthly freedom
just for me to repeat and ask you

how much will it cost to be left alone
to be writing novels while the cities go to war.