Not because you, the ordinary citizen have done terrible things:
those have been done by those in power,
those who make things so needlessly
complicated and useless, so that they do not have to recognise
that they still lack any kind of functional or intelligent substance.
And it’s not that they are predisposed, or shut out from that kind of function—
and of course, one must want to serve the collective, and support its injunctions—
but it’s that the tears they cry are made of the skin of the tears they took from us,
the ways they claimed they shook for us when we were terrified and traumatised.
We didn’t realise what was still waiting for us, just out of sight:
a visualisation, as clear, at last, as any kind of daylight
that these people have no interest in us.
These people do not care about scholarship, or research, or even doing what’s right:
all they care about is being ahead when the fights
they think will happen begin, for what little is left of the world’s resources
and what little is left of you and I.
Don’t you go giving up on me. I didn’t not die
to watch your pride, and valor, and courage disappear. To watch you hide
who you really are. Now, more than ever, the time draws near
for you to stand up. For you to show that you were made to survive
anything. Even the world, weeping,
as the fire ravages everything around it,
and all the water it needs
is what it’s not seeing—
all the solutions that could one day be
are what the monsters within us are slowly, and relishingly
devouring.