Urgent, like my thoughts, the situation is unbecoming—to say the least.
That’s all I seem to have been doing of late—saying, singing: words.

Questioning my place, my voice, and the hand that forces me to obey.
The hand that belongs to me, the hand that signals for escape.

In quilts of comfort, the miracle of a particular birth, I boil.
Luckily, I control the fire beneath me, the gas in measured pipes.

As with the cries of children
leaping out
of a deep wells’ darkness
I listen.
If I can hear us, you can too.

When will this hand raise as a fist, unfettered by possibilities, assured and angry?
When will this examination of privilege end, giving way to the songs of war?

Confessing how you nurse your guilt with daydreams of
impassioned yet inornate speeches,
moments of common bravery,
images of perfect resistance,
and the sacrifice of spectacle
will do nothing.

The metaphors of war and fury can only run so far, and then, you must use your own feet.
Don’t worry—these feet of yours will learn to stand as you forget to weep.

The situation, suffice to say, has always been a finger’s pull away from grizzly death.
The finger which pulls a trigger for one, signs away a million others’ breath.

Sadder than the violence sprouting from each seed spread,

are the merry children, accepting the saplings with love

Poverty is violence, their ledger is leaking red,
red from all the blood that flows out from the dead.

A democracy unquestioned is dictatorship unrealised.

While I wile away these hours - rhyme the time away -
my words grow into flowers which blossom in the day.
Now, it is the night— my conscience grows quiet;
Silently I tell myself, “Tomorrow, I shall riot!”