Blue lights
White skin
Silver cuffs
Black wrists
Blood red
Protecting and serving
Whose interests?
Violence begets more violence
But why do the opposite
Meet the same demise?
On both sides
Lines drawn in the sand
Barriers made in streets
Standoffs and showdowns
“Put down your weapon”
Which one’s drawn?
Hypocrites
Raise pillars, voices overshadowing grumblings, rantings, raise
pillars to move
legions and legends. Salvation is in voices of sanity, reproof of
mindlessness. Scourge elements suppressing
Voices.
Break my back
Rape my humane considerations
Barrage my mind with all this “news” that is not news
And it’s all
Just another form of slavery
Hijacking our innate motivation to determine our own conclusions
We know well of your need to keep us all stuffed
Crammed into your crafted paradigm
Emotional selfish poison to digress one’s consciousness
Back to an infant needy state
Push me down with the heel of your eight hundred dollar shoe
Paid for with my sweat equity forced tax “donation”
Stranded on the lower rungs
Threat of humiliation and isolation
Of being a “nobody”
Insignificant even to those of our own blood
Rats in a cage shaped like a shopping mall
We time our days by what we consume
Swapping cabins on the Titanic
I want to grow, expand
Move on, forward, off, away
I love the fog
But the kind of my own creation
Not your mindless misery polluted stew
Wake up
More at https://taralynnhawk.com.
I’m contemplating the effects of these memories
the effects of these sounds and situations forever surrounding me.
I’m considering the boundaries and borders encircling my brain,
burdens as bombs exploding in the midst of my mind,
systems stifling my sanity
stealing every semblance of my common senses.
I’m sitting in the middle of my own silence
contemplating emancipation,
searching for a freedom that no society could present
longing for real liberty and a perpetually distant paradise.
I’m drowning again in useless memories
and a barrage of the irrelevant and unnecessary,
still searching for a freedom that I may never find,
devoured by a dream that I shouldn’t live with,
dwelling in an existence that I shouldn’t try to define…
More at https://formuchdeliberation.wordpress.com/tag/poetry/.
The rich write books
About how they got out of their rags
And that’s fair enough.
But is there a market
For other stories of miracle?
Stories by those who have the remains of the day
And yet remain.
Of those who live a little above, below, around the lines of poverty–
Measured and cut out for them by others
At a table with chairs made by, not for, them–
And yet manage to have lives.
Can that blurb produce a wow,
Inspire the reader to pick up the book?
Or do we predict more of a shrug, because the story is ordinary, because “they’re used to it”?
More at https://anandankita.blogspot.in.
The good disappear
And no one speaks of it
A type of sanctioned poison covers it
Waiting to be released but for the key of a syllable
Hearts burn quickly and minds stay numb
They shuffle back and forth each day
With buried acknowledgement
There is no comfortable silence
It screams and moans with sweat and abuse
Then leaves them to die in loneliness
With no solemn bagpipe accompaniment
Elusive relaxation evades the tourniquet
The new normal
More at https://www.taralynnhawk.com/.
Crestfallen, we stomped out boots over the crunchy leaves and down the steps into the subway tunnels where grieving commuters tuned out a little more than usual today
I thought I heard Mother Earth say “In some ways, she’d be just as bad anyway” as evidenced by the strange sunlight of this strange November day. “She did this too, in some kind of way…”
And I don’t like to argue with Mother Earth, but the day before I had to tell her “A flood is gonna come if I don’t make this strange sunlight go away”
So I sat down on the part of this walk that makes sense to me, where the beaten-up harbor smells like the sea. It’s where I usually go to get clarity – but that day? So scared of the blood, he took the wind right out of me.
“But you can swim and handle the wind” she whispers as the tide comes in.”
Yes, it’s true, I know how to swim. But it was others who’d sink as the tide came in.
And though I am the one who doesn’t need to sun every day
The plants, they will die if you take it away!
And, then, the sweet Mother Earth that once cradled me when I was ill
Disappeared with the wind and I was forced to be still
The clouds blocked the sun and the beams went away
And the shine on the harbor went from blue to gray
And it was 8:55 so we headed to the ship
Latinas and Muslims and LGBT folks in the mix
In shock, you’d wonder if we were indifferent to it
But the wind hit us harder than we’d like to admit
And it wasn’t until I left the embrace of the mother
That I approached the crowded boat with my sisters and brothers
Me light, them dark, we were separated at birth
As it rained on their crops and I drank from the Earth
I drank from the Earth, having no idea
The frenzy that floods cause for the people I see here
Here in the city that stole me from trees
Where I learned from others how to master the breeze
I breathed in their struggles, I stood in their trains
Until I could no longer swallow water, knowing how much they get screwed when it rains
So I am now on this boat with the gardeners and their weeds
It’s a dreary ride with an oppressive breeze
And I lock eyes with a woman, she’s darker than me
The fear. We connect. I finally see what she sees.