Excuse me, where is your anger?
Where is your frustration
at how events have played out
and how the players have eventually been decided?
Where is your rage
against the criminally
underpaid, the destitute,
those who are hung out
to dry
after the state executes
their events, their plays,
their plans for their lives
cut, and dried, deified and denied?
Don't you dare come and complain
when it is over
when it is done
and there is no one left to witness that
it is over
that it is done
that you are done
that your dreams crumbled in the sand
as their tides came in, soaking, sweltering.
Boy, girl, boy-girl, you could have sat up
you could have listened
you could have heard how we were losing everything
how you were losing everything.
That's why I ask you
did you lose it?
Did you lose your anger?
Did you lose your knowledge of all that was
at the wars
at the heatwaves
at the displacements
at the food shortages
at the power outages?
What strange power was this?
Did the power they have —
resplendent, ebullient, intricate, unabashed,
a somewhat shape of words, a fool's fire of lies,
a litany beneath the law, chanted and spread like butter across butterfly —
I'm sorry, but did the power they have
somehow negate yours?
Stand up, in your heart,
so that you might stand up, in your place,
in your time, in your space.
Stand up because you deserve you:
because god and the gods,
munificent and mummified, benign and bellicose
god and the gods made you who you are,
until they, all of them could not.
Until only you,
today, with this heart, with this face,
only you could make you who you are:
battered, beaten down, betrayed,
still beautiful,
still blazing.
Let this poem stand
let this poem through
just so that it can say
just how much its love
blazes for you.
And mark this poem's words:
they will bring forth the blazes,
the bullets, the missiles,
the missives, the money.
No doubt there will be many.
But no doubt, don't forget
don't worry, don't shy away from
this blazing truth:
that there will also be you,
blazing, furious, unfiltered, unfettered,
unrelenting,
a member of this time, this space,
this planet, this place,
very much unexcused
until you decide you're done with them,
done with them all,
and you resolve to beg pardon
not now,
not ever,
no more,
not ever more.