Letter From America

Mama,
You ask me why my letters are getting shorter, if I am still quite alright. You say that I don't sound like myself, that my words could be anybody's, the way they fall like stone onto paper.

The truth is that I barely know myself any more, mama, my own language grown stale under a swarm of phrases I half understand. Our language: sometimes I speak it to myself in the mirror at night, just to know that under the layer of smog I'm still there. But our language sounds like an old door now, and sometimes the yellow light flickers in the sirens and my own reflection starts to look like a cracked screen.

Feet crammed full of concrete until my soles feel like they are made of neon: bright and cold and numb.
This isn't how it was meant to be.
But this is how it is, buddy so keep walking keep walking.

These walls thinner than a flag, streets made of spit, stars made of plastic. Tick, tick, tick. I can't breathe, mama, and I am afraid.

Are buildings grown from the sky or falling from the ground? Not that, not that.

Fuck you man. Fuck you buddy.

Work. I'll do it. Yes I'll do it. Anything. I don't care. I'll sleep on the windows of buses. I'll sleep in the space between bending down to pick up a box and standing up with it in my arms. I'll sleep in the blinks between conveyer belts. I'll use the cold halo of antibacterial spray as my pillow. I don't care I said, I said I don't care.

Hope like a herb. Sprinkled on a pizza; eaten by a toothless man; and burped out with a pepsi stain on the wall. And then shitted out. Into a system of metal lines which aren't magic, just a feat of engineering.

I heard a woman crying for hours like her heart had been taken siege. Walls like a flag, mama, a voice like yours. I didn't comfort her. I hid my head under the blanket. You think I want to get shot? You want me to get shot? Shot things don't make money, mama! How d'you like that?
But you know that, why am I telling you this? Sorry, mama sorry, I didn't mean to shout. It's just that everyone is shouting here.

Once I saw a man eating dirt and I didn't stop to help him but no one stops to help here so it doesn't matter. Any one of these people could be kind, but not me, just in case.

In the subway there are crazy people.
You aren't meant to look them in the eyes.
Maybe I'm one of them.

Maybe I should throw myself under the tracks.

Fuck you man. Wake up. Don't be stupid. Your family needs you, man.
Fuck you. Fuck YOU! Crawling. Crawling. Crawl in.

Take the money, mama. Eat it. Feed it to the little ones. Frame it and put it on the wall next to your father's picture; make yourself a dress of stars and stripes. But please, whatever you do, just don't worry about me. I cannot do it all. I once thought I could. But that was before I came to America and things are different now.

Mama? Are you there?
Of course not, of course not.
This is the sort of letter that can never really be sent.