-feeling lonely

like this:
There is a bully at school, he is rather thick and punches you in the lining of your stomach like licking the fat from seared belly meat.  The bully throws baseballs through car windows and scoops hot asphalt with his pink hands, shoving it down the slide for unsuspecting children.  Worse yet, he thinks you are stupid.  The bully steals your lunch and lunch money and sells it to your teachers, charging you interest when you forget your lunch or your mother doesn’t give you as much money as the prior afternoons of theft.  It is a contract, you understand.  He sells your lunch to teachers in exchange for a grading curve that makes you seem stupid.  Your teachers call you stupid and the bully gets fat from eating your lunch and your stomach lining

-feeling pitied
-feeling worse
-eating too much bread
-saturated industry along the equator

listen:
You are tired of eating shit and believing your teachers.  You believe the bully’s brother.  He is thinner and older and explains that he does not believe in hell, even for little brother, and wishes peace and love and free lunches for the poor brown children.  He even walks around holding a brown child’s hand, dragging her along with him as he petitions for change.  This makes you feel inclusive and want to visit Oaxaca or perhaps Detroit.  So be it.  You sign the lead-smeared petition with a red colored marker, it reads: “Of the Students, By the Students, For the Students,” and it makes you feel quite attached to your school’s football team.  The bully has lost his popularity in favor of generalized social responsibility and teachers kiss the dirt beneath their feet as his mother pulls him from campus by the lobe of his ear

-holes in your fence
-feeling fragile
-being expected of
-being handcuffed
-absolutism
-being blindsided by imperatives

a train is coming and you have the railroad switch:
There is much rejoicing in ideological victory, many children reject fundamentalism, the bourgeoisie are consumed by their pant legs to the mud.  A consciousness of nihilism sets in and is accepted as the rational view of the child’s condition under the political prowling of the former bully.  All are one another and equally nothing.  Suddenly, an elementary school on the East side runs out of funding due to county budget cuts and is subsequently shut down.  The board redistricts bus routes and begins sending children to your school.  Classes are crowded.  The quality of school lunches decrease, though your mother makes your lunch.  You feel slighted, as do the teachers.  The principal shrugs, and older brother takes charge.  He is not the bully, remember.  Older brother entreaties the scrupulous population of the playground, please, do not allow our fences to be damaged, our playground tarnished; the loitering suspicious persons on the East side are to blame for this redistricting; our peers have the right to attend their wasteland of underfunded opportunity without fear of being sent to our campus that supports the arts; something must be done.  Brother appeals to the board, rallies the troops, and concludes that complete annihilation is the only logical response.  There is an assembly

-burnt coffee
-forest fires
-fire beneath your house
-all consuming heat
-deserts
-feeling conflicted about the atomic bomb

indecisiveness:
“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”  You listen as the question echoes throughout the gymnasium

-tradition
-sacrifice
-volunteering to go into harm’s way to risk everything
-pretending you don't want glory
-pretending you don't want profit

being nothing:
Defend the holy ground of your playground.  The bully's older brother exhorts a settlement: that a non-nuclear Mother Of All Bombs be dropped on the East side campus that is now overtaken with loiterers, delivering 11 tons of TNT upon the shriveled desert of education that is sharing a bus and, in turn, flatten the campus and slums.  Collateral damage is inevitable.  This is unanimously passed, as is a motion calling for increased police presence to circle the blast zone in retired military tanks, carrying automatic rifles.  Then, shall the problem be eradicated, when our salty brethren be returned to their sea of nothingness

-reading the prophet Isaiah
-Big Brother touching burning coal to your lips
-being nothing