Tea Bags

When I walk into the Middle Eastern
Grocery store to buy a box of Ahmad tea bags
It’s difficult to keep myself from thinking
These young men may sometimes tinker in
Backrooms with getting to Heaven posthaste
And I am somehow responsible for their deaths

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And the deaths of their possible victims
Should they need just the cost of a box of tea
To finish their vests. Are such notions only
The typical wonderings of an infidel or are they
Lines of thought like some dark poetry born
Of media-speak and images that explode from

Indisputable facts that too often play out in
Brutal death color on saturation news broadcasts?
I feel certain it is no base racism though I acknowledge
It is certainly implied. Not from my heart but
From the subtle conditioning of dark poetry that as
I am infidel to them they are jihad to me.

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