There's no free lunch

anymore

if there ever was.

Nothing is free

not love

nor a place to pour your heart

in words

and receive support

not mandatory scripted critiques

written for points to earn mandatory scripted critiques

or pay your ten bucks plus up front

to only to find out

you'll never be accepted

even if you wrote there 33 years.

I've tried them all

none offered this clean inviting slate

thoughtful challenging prompts that stimulate

or a community that folds around you

protective muse wings

that no money

can buy.

We choose

those things we value with our cash.

Those things define who we will ever become.

There's no free lunch.

Our children will suffer.

Half of the children do not eat

At home with their father and mother.

Society cries out for health and wealth just to be alive.

Yet the higher authorities starve

The minds of those that strive.

Is it safe to say that the working man and woman deserve a break?

Or is it safer to say that the higher authorities is the reason for the stomach ache?

No, there is no free lunch to help the world survive.

But there is trust in God to keep our hopes alive.

Blue is good. Like the cloudless sky and crisp, clean water.

Yellow is dirty. Like a hazard, a warning, or a terminal disease.

For the kids whose parents had prepaid for their school lunches, they stood in line holding blue cards.

I did not hold a blue card. I was one of the kids that received free lunches. Not “reduced” lunches, no. I qualified all the way to the last step: fully subsidized.

I would stand in that lunch line, clutching tight to the only reason I would eat that day. I wished for some way to hide the yellow color of my card as it felt unreasonably visible in my small hands.

Lunch was free, yet it cost so much.

I had a free lunch;

long I thought, and

it wasn't by ticket

or digital coupon

I didn't swipe a card

avoiding debit or credit

or otherwise shameface

self or neighbors;

It was brought to me

quietly in the dawn

like a mouse gnawing

the small opening to a barn

a simple open-eye affair

real or imagined

that is all

on deathbed hay

I repainted my banquet

with a milliard hungry

mental brushstrokes

for lack

of material, and words,

and could

almost taste

every last living morsel

disappearing as quickly

as it had all appeared

free... and not free

Fried eggs used to gag

me, send me into fits

of dry heaves

and denial, still, I learned

to exorcise that demon

by eating raw ones

in a glass so everyone

could see me choke

down pre-chick amniotic.

now, late at night, trapped

in a dirty motel room,

tits flying in my face,

I ask her to go down

and take what she wants.

”pay up,” she says

and as I dug the going rate from

the pocket of my acid washed jeans, I mumbled,

“lunch is on me.”

Panhandling for the handle of a pan.

No food,an empty pan with nothing to hold.

No sizzle,only drizzle that saturates my thoughts.

The cold wind wraps around my naked body,as I sleep under the frozen stars.

Icicle tears fall into my weathered shoes, flooding me with bitter reality.

A nickel to my name,I'm not a loony,I'll never see my face on a twenty dollar bill.

I ask for change,a change of clothes,a change in my situation.

But for now,I will push on.

I will pull the threads from your pockets.

With my lifeless eyes,that give birth to another day.