God decreed that others would always be a face,
blackened and burnt by the sun,
and by the dawn,
when it rises up to hang you for the price of one
long, drawn-out supermassive projection—
your life was worth absolutely nothing, even the interventions
it took to stop them
from stopping me from writing this poem.
Your life was worth absolutely nothing.
Yours and mine;
when justice is left hanging,
there is nothing left for us to say except
no. Who the fuck wants to say it?
Who the fuck wants to say they were always right
about what was going on behind
closed doors?
We let it happen for so many years.
We believed in the lies that they enforced.
We did not believe in the lives that they tore
apart. In the families they claimed to love. That they claimed they saw
as family. When this much evidence is pounding at your door
I don’t know how you continue to go about, as if everything was possibly more
important.
I don’t know how you continue to scream and shout about literally
nothing, about populist ideas and Regional Libraries opening
when the ground you stand on
is made of the blood of people who are my students,
and who are you,
eviscerated and left so fucking wanting
for an accounting which will never come.
The projection was that evil is the side of the soul
that is charred in the sun.
Evil is the kind of person
that does not trust the ones
who hold the hangman’s noose, and the guns, and the firearms.
Evil is in the moon, and in every last one of all five stars.
Evil is the betrayal that is slowly ripping this psyche-state apart.
Evil is what you make of it, you claim.
I absolutely agree:
evil begins in the heart,
or lack of one.