this is not a horror story

The living sleep by the dead
in staccato houses
that are really just walls
and sometimes roofs
and wooden doors
inscribed with God's verses

because there is not enough
money
or space
or humanity
in a city

full of medicated men and women
high on hash, cigarettes, and heavy food
so that one meal
can last an entire day

and a numbed mind
won't notice

hunger, or pain, or the fear
of laying in bed
at night
in a graveyard

near the body of a man
you never knew
alive

but have come to know well,
dead.