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Dalia |
He was not incarcerated, but he said:
“Our neighbors they are barbarians
Walls loom high, and the administration hums.
I hold a warm gun,
I zip my pants,
I don’t eat with them,
because the walls make me.
I sleep at night
because the walls let me.
The walls force my stupidity,
and the walls force my intelligence,
and consequently I am punished.
I will either pledge allegiance
And strive for a double standard self-defeating contradiction
Or I will transcend, transcend
And die breathing the truth.
One is a penalty and one is a penalty.”
I sang through bars to the man,
Because it was all I knew how to do from the day I was born:
We will miss these vessels,
Young soldiers carried out to the frontier,
Young and exciting.
They sprout like chloroplasts
In this dirt farm.
We are not privy to their noises.
Excuses are jarred up like grains in the cellar;
We can’t contain them.
The incident has nothing to do with that;
Don’t solve it,
Don’t use it in your story.
We are not trained in metalworks,
We don’t follow a drumbeat so casual,
Like a stark, holiday-marked message,
On the board is where we come from;
Delighted as pineapples
We both think we are hard and we are both soft when we perish.
Dance in the running away parade,
Hold still and quake,
There is a reason for these park mountains,
These scapegoats don’t feel pleasure.
He summoned his mate, who showed me his scars,
Snaking deep obliteration up his arm,
like the branding of a war tattoo,
and his voice rustled:
We are these beams and cement blocks,
We are the doors and walls and scaffolding,
We are the uniforms, we are the ground-up.
We take up whips with spikes,
We take up chains and bars,
We take money, we take recognition.
We are not the brains behind the operation,
We are not the willing or the dissenting,
We are not ourselves.
We are the provoked and manipulated,
We are the moulded and the misinformed,
We are the structure of the device.
We take plea bargains out of context,
We put our names on the work of others,
We extend our shame to the counter of the bar.
Labels: Dalia
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