Lila Vigil
2020

I will be thinking I did not raise my son to die
in a war waged for someone's personal agenda.

I will be thinking of a sister who can no longer
cross the chasm of Christian beliefs to talk to me.

I will be reading headlines of Asian world
domination and a hundred thousand dow.

I will weep for the suicide rate of Arabic women
in the post-oil-economy religious fundamentalism.

I will be experimenting with astroprojection.

I will be hearing radio speeches
from a Hispanic president
full of new solutions to the US famine while
looking over junk-mail about Mars homesteads.

I will struggle with a purpose for my life and
miss the scars on my lover's face.

I will believe I am still too young
to be alone for this long.

I will be assessing the performance of a
new breed of kayak that's taken me
twenty years to afford.  I will be sitting, alone,
lightly in a green river, testing my salt,
swiveling my hips in a hula
through quiet currents.

I will be searching Latin markets
for natural textiles and things made of real wood.

I will be trying to pay for all the
personal technologies that promise to
usher me through an easier day
and still much too mindful of my fat intake.

I will be lacking the brevity with which I once spoke
and regretting the diversity I once embraced, and
lamenting the Europe I?ll never see.

I will be wishing I were still young enough
to want to be this alone.
 
Copyright © 1999 Lila Vigil
All Rights Reserved 

Lila Vigil is a user.  She's been medicating herself with poetry most of
her life.  She learned to hide poems while completing her MEd but she's
shown up at poetry seminars and read in bars, coffeehouses and bookstores
around Florida.  She's been included in regional newspapers and anthologies
including, most recently, Eclipse and the Sarasota Review of Poetry, as
well as Spoken War and other electronic poetry journals.  She has two
collections of poems, Penis Poems and  Heightened Apathy and currently
supports two workshops with other part time-poets; one is called WRiTE!
(Writers' Rut Termination Effort!).   Today, Lila manages her addiction,
posing as a strategic consultant with a technology group and tries to keep
her despicable habit from ruining her 10-year-old son, Aaron.