With great intended care………….no,
               let me start again
In hand shaky haste, I slid the package,
               all that I had left,
                             through the slot in the cloudy glass.
That chunky glass they want you to think is bullet proof.
Behind the barely transparent smudge wall,
               the man scrutinizes it with a jeweler’s loupe.
Taps it with a small file, snaps at it with his teeth.
“Not interested. Gold plate”.
Seriously?
Are you kidding me?
All these years I so zealously protected it.
Tenderly placing it in it’s velvet storage box.
Cleverly hiding it in a basket of dirty laundry
             whenever I was going out of town.
I had held onto it for so long, cherishing it as
          my most precious of possessions.
Keeping mine whilst my friends and associates had long discarded theirs.
All this time and effort, to find out it is just
              base metal and gold paint.
F#*king halo.

Tara Lynn Hawk is a poet and artist whose work has appeared previously on OCCULUM as well as Uut, Spelk, Anti-Heroin Chic, Spilling Cocoa, Excavating the Underground, Social Justice :Poetry, etc.  Her ebook, The Dead, is available on Smashwords.  “taralynnhawk.com”