(1)

Yesterday in our town forty seven pedestrians
observed symptoms of seasonal depression
sometime between sunup and inevitable sundown.

Of them, twelve coped with a half-panic whose queasy
threshold is hard to tell of, and let’s not forget
the new hires, a couple mangled on a conveyor belt.

It’s a small town mind you, and the poison being
out of sight doesn’t help. It may be far-fetched to say
it undergirds the subtlest of our exchanges but—

I believe I saw poison take plain form seeing a boy
splurge his first paycheck in a candy shop, a boy
unaware his pride inflamed the poison’s dosage.

(2)

As the boy grew I mustered up the will to ask
if he sensed it like sand sidelong down his spine
as I did. There’s a medicine just for that, he said.

Practically a balm easing one’s shiver, and sweet:
we all heard tell. Imagine it in my head the years
I believed my insides turned purple against an ill wind.

(3)

I want to show the world its poison
however tough it is for busy souls to take notice
or fraught or pale my powers to sway them.

I’ve long wanted to expose this poison for what
it is, can hardly perceive it with my dearth
of five senses or say why it resists being named.

Look, there it is, it’s in the air and in a stone
both starved of touched moments when we can
only give moments so few hours compared to it.

(4)

I would write into a modest book this twinning
of neural economics with neurotoxins were these not
dreamed-up hunches or pitied theories I mean.

Still what with children overworking their every cell
to offer the poison its heaping stockpile of energy,
you cannot fault me for trying, you cannot knowingly

and with a straight face tell me to shake
an invisible hand or, worse, to not seek succor
from its easygoing stealth—you can go heedless

like those before you who drink dark of its swelling,
write op-eds in light of elixirs pretending to bloodlessness,
to darlings, to fellowship, all the blue night.