You Have to Understand
Heather L. Rollins
You have to understand:
I don’t want to die on the streets, sleeping in a box behind the dumpster,
and I don’t want to beg for food or eat at the church soup kitchen with the god-botherers,
and I don’t want to be evicted and homeless and possess only what I can carry on my back,
and I don’t want to be desperate to pay my bills and lose electricity—it’s a romantic meal by candlelight, dear!—and internet access and water,
and I don’t want to get laid off or fired because I just can’t figure out how to do this new thing you’re asking me to do,
and therefore, I regret that I am unable to comply with your request to change the cover sheet that goes on the TPS Reports.
My apologies.
Heather L. Rollins
Heather L. Rollins wrote her first poems at age 8 and then went on to work as a software engineer and a statistician. Currently, at an age much greater than 8, Heather is a mother, wife, troublemaker, PhD student in epidemiology, and still a writer of poems. Deeply spiritual, Heather believes that we are most beautiful at the broken places, and that is where most of her poems live.