A toddler wobbled across the huge expanse of space and time

and fell into his mother’s arms

a squeal of infant joy leaping from his mouth––

soaring as he was

on the irrepressible winds of his own delight,

loving every sumptuous bite of his epic journey.

He leaned back,

clutching his mother''s thumbs in each little fist,

turning his head behind him

to flash his giggling effervescence at his grinning father,

who had started him on his trans-galactic trek

between the outskirts of chair and couch.

The world was so large then,

as parents and child savored this moment of infinite possibilities

But the orbits around the sun piled up

the constellations traded places in the heavens

and the immense universe that was the toddler's world shrunk

into a sardine can of a three-room tenement shack

packing him, two sisters, and his parents on top of one another

Packed them in the grease of lard and saved bacon fat

that enabled poor people to slide around each other

when there was no space at all to get by.

His sisters had come like sly, twin comets sizzling toward the Earth

through the burning atmosphere of mom and dad's ardor

which had driven them beneath the sheets

out of the unconscious need to create life

in their own image and likeness—

to utterly disregard the crushing-in of their impoverished world

and steal from it the dignity of choice it had otherwise denied.

Already, upon reaching seven,

the boy was slowly disappearing

into the bog of his neighborhood-world’s fortune tellers

who divined his future—from the depths of their own defeatism—

as a life of inconsequence

Sign by sign their augury bones and shells immured his dreams

inside a thicket of dismissal

squeezed them down from the large life promised

into one that was tiny and unfulfilling.

There was still a twinkle in his eyes that left room for greater possibility

but it was more a sparkle of hope than solid belief

Even his peals of raucous laughter when tickled silly by his own antics

carried an infection of growing cynicism

By twelve, he was living with a sneering skeptic inside his head

who snickered at his foolishness to dream bigger than the life he had.

And the soaring joy of his parents

once raising his bravery higher than mountains shadowing his fears

to strike out across the gulf of chance and win his desires

plummeted to a misery starched into words rebuking his dreams

and condemning his life as a burden.

So their sweet child

their first born, their first pride, their first love

became their first wounded:

slowly bleeding of distrust, of despair, of gnawing hunger for affection—

day after day, night after night, year after year

into death and death’s shadow.

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Excerpt From: Carl Hitchens. “Thinning of the Veil.” Carl Hitchens, 2018

Author Audio Reading: https://duende.bandcamp.com/track/hitchins-hunger

iBooks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/thinning-of-the-veils/id1402841660?mt=11

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