politics

Thank god it was news

And not something you learned of later

A sidenote in someone else’s history

Thank god that it breaks hearts

That we call it what it is

A crime, a tragedy

Thank god we know it happened

And we don’t call it a joke

Pretend it doesn’t matter

Once, nobody cried when our lives were cut short

Once, daring to live your life meant you

Deserved such a death

Destroyed in the act of acceptance

Immolated by a false fear

This underhanded belief

masking itself as love

Yet our lives still matter less

Yet still we mourn

We rage

We do not deserve this

This death

These denials

Here, we stand

Here and now

No defeat

No erasure

No surrender

It is you who made this a war

It is you who are defeated

When all we ever wanted was peace

(June 2023)

This is not the most sophisticated poem, in that it makes its claims more overtly than others I have written. The power of poetry is its ability to sidestep a facet of society and/or the human experience, not to avoid it but to observe it differently.

Black and white divisions are for chessboards, not for people. The natural world is characterized by permeable membranes. Things must pass into you, out of you, through you, in order for you to be alive. Parts of you are always dying and other parts being reborn and the idea that anything is static is simply that, an idea which says nothing about how reality actually behaves.

The opposite of freedom isn’t imprisonment, it’s surveillance.

how did we let it happen?

this televised delusion

spectacularized demons who accuse us of their crimes

while they are still committing them

like a schoolyard bully asking

why are you punching yourself?

and we reply politely

offer counter points of view

and they laugh and call us snowflakes

and we let them

let’s go on strike

whenever someone uses a lying word like

snowflake

cuck

those people

those queers

those…aw, but we can’t say that word no more

go on strike

walk off the conversational job

demand better conditions

or walk away

“I don’t owe you my time.”

“You call it an opinion but to me it sounds like hate.”

“We work together. We don’t need to be friends.”

“You’re talking about people I care about.”

“How could you believe that about another human being?”

do not do their labour

don’t scab yourself to their delusions

refuse to negotiate on the definition of your selfhood

or the selfhood of others

their lies have no authority in the court of your self-worth

they are the ones in prison

they have built the walls themselves

and here we are outside

you and I and all of us

together in the garden

loving

free

(23/03/2023)

I originally thought of calling this not-quite-a-poem “You Fuckers Wanna See Some Cancel Culture?” but sometimes short titles are better.

I also acknowledge that many of us live and work in unsafe places and cannot ‘walk away’ without causing ourselves immense harm. It’s perfectly acceptable to strike by simply not dignifying the offending party’s remarks with a response. A blank stare can work wonders when someone’s fishing for a laugh.

Tag: politics

Colorado

Strike