These Headphones Should Be Free

I walk down a dim hall, and appreciate the coruscating layer of wax on the floor

(how I could sleep there!)

laid probably earlier today, or last week, or in the time before Securus tablets, that time before headphones when Jesus Christ himself roamed old earth and pulled men

from dirt slumber. Why are you complaining? It is unbecoming and very much beneath you, very much like the man you ran into the soil, velvet sky polka dotted with the remnants of creation winking overhead. He’ll never

listen to The Trouble with Fever, and would never ever stew over a lack of cheap earbuds. Even that, I am certain, is beneath him.

I aspire to be more like that man. Quiet, cold, painless, alone. Instead, The Man gave me everything to which I am entitled: purple and turquoise walls, three hots, a cot, and Scantron grocery lists. Among other things, I am filled to the brim with privilege; the sum of thirty-six months is mercy. Divine. Ineffable. Using a borrowed black

Bic I bubble off what, by chance or by karma, I am missing, bite my tongue till it bleeds, and swallow copper self-righteousness and leaden pride. Force myself to

remember how life is unfair, how one life snuffed negligently out becomes many, and how much money I’ll have for next week’s order. I imagine in vivid phantasmagoria how different

life might be if I paid attention in church, if I kept on going every Sunday with Grandma. Probably I’d still be an erupting volcano of shame and contrition, wondering forever

where Jesus Christ is when you need him and if my prayers are just mp3s for aliens.