Below is an unrevised, off-the-cuff poem in response to the xenophobia gaining momentum in the wake of the Paris attacks.
I don’t know how else to react- to 25 American politicians stamping their feet like children at the prospect of letting in desperate people, suffering at the hand of an ignorant world power, a product of our political line of rhetoric.
It’s all well and good if the faces are blurred and abstract. If you can’t picture families with children fleeing the end of their lives, their premature deaths, it’s easier to close the bolted gate.
I’m not acting as a journalist right now, but I do believe in the process and the objectivity. I also believe that sometimes our art and “feelings” and music and comedy can illuminate corners objectivity can’t see.
I would urge everyone to educate themselves to the fullest extent of their abilities, seek out views opposite of your own, and explore the depth of your own compassion.
Too many of us have no real vision of the texture of death. It’s time to be reminded of your own eventual end, which will not be protected by a neat American infrastructure or prayer.
How do you get a message out?
In bottles, I would drift across and back
slipping a paper shifting into
my pocket,
undoing the bottle’s lid.
Crawl into where
we are smaller,
and can all fit.
On the mainland we
cast big shadows,
Unfasten our belts on state lines
to make way
for all terror-stricken faces.
Confused about what
exactly is causing the confusion.
Shrink down and hide,
a shrill battle-desperate-cry.
You trying to tell me
that this is what courage looks like?
I want to strangle
the safe intentions
being sold like movie tickets.
There is no color
black and white
out there other than
the end of the sky
and the beginning of a cosmic
collapsing.
As the first horseman of the apocalypse, pestilence, descends on the major cities of the world, pecking off people one by one with a malarial mosquito army behind him- Twitter would allow the common lay-person fleeing from the scene to comment on the biblical rider of evil’s hideous choice of outfit.
Brainsmear 