(Hugs Narrative) Cycling Domestic Warriors of Cleaners and Craft

foreign love did not forget heavens
or feisty riverbeds with parked evening cards
and broken hips or perhaps it was exploding kidneys
that suddenly made me want to be feel touched again

wine under the carpet and in the teeth of crisped waivers
I was sent back through the hall and told to get a 3rd bottle
the gifted artist with the confetti gave me the wine free
and I was able to keep the $10 for what I wanted

I knew this marked an occasion to get Ferrero Rocher
the classism could not be more bright, not withstanding
the older I was and the more I spent on wine, laughing,
the worse it was and the less effective it was all around

I rather be in my 20s again scrubbing church toilets
and mopping car dealerships and buffing universities
getting up at 3 am to for the newspaper run
more or less no more sane and fulfilled as now

painful memories of nailing porches, framing walls
hating getting to the second floor on the beach
falling off the ladder, mispronouncing the tools
being forced to put up the fence by myself

what little money I had managed to go further
as a video store clerk I had a Beamer, sunroof,
now I cannot afford a car at all, not that I need one,
the suction of time has isolated me, but protection
has arrived in ways that I could never imagine
classism stepping on me then, hugging me now

books upon books, classes upon classes
multiple degrees later and I still could not
move out of the lower class, it took even more,
seeing even more that the “American Dream,” merit,
was a lie, a complete a myth, never a certainty
it was only God’s direct intervention that helped

and even then, God did not want me to be corrupted,
lower middle class is high as I have reached,
it took to middle age to get here, dreaming
all the way, damned all the way, disabled all the way,
I should have never had to have worked to begin with
some countries never would have expected me to work