What I see are kids who feel betrayed. Adolescents feel betrayed while mom and dad twist in the wind. Adolescents feel everything. A leaf blows in the yard. No summer school. Fear and loathing in family after family. Adolescents run away and no one knows what will happen next but no one ever knows what will happen next what will happen next will be the recognition that the systems we have so invested are mad. So everyone has been fucked in the mouth and it just seeps down your throat like thick ooze canned as mushroom soup. Education has to be more than what we can get away with on the Internet. Zoom has not zoomed its last zoom.

I am a communist. In my work with young adolescent males who live with HIV, people walk through you. Disassociation. Covid is happening to someone else as is death. Covid and HIV are a graveyard. You see what you want to see. Kids who have lost both parents often see them in old family places like the kitchen where the table has been ritually set. He folds clothes the way his mom did. Small things count. The boy grows defiant. This is denial. Foster homes are stretched so thin, no one wants to do it. Adolescents will explode. And blurt out info that shocks parents who thought they had a handle on dealing with Little Johnny. Parents reel. I listen and nod (why parents do not pick up on this, these listening skills, but they don’t) as the kid who was not in school is now suddenly verbal about how he has been trying to kill himself.

His timing is off. As a son, he has failed to be the man they wanted. The guilt gets thick. His parents now gone forever. And you want kids like this in a classroom that provides you with babysitting. With what. With babysitting. What are you, a complete idiot. It’s the kids’ turn to reel. We are all reeling. Getting HIV antiretrovirals was a nightmare. I fail to see where means testing helps anyone but Manchin who I am told has called gay men faggots as a knee jerk. Freeze. Where are the WV communities willing to stand up to the cultural abuser and be counted. Try defying Joe Manchin who wants my kids deeply embedded in being poor. Some of us are grieving. More kids are killing themselves at a rate we have never seen. The hopeless kid at-risk grits his teeth. I am a communist.