When the world is burning:
flesh peeling from bone
like charred meat forgotten on a barbecue;
you keep writing poems
about your ruptured romance.
Or worse:
about hope.
About light at the end of tunnels.
About humanity prevailing.
About flowers growing through concrete
as if metaphor can resurrect the dead.
As if a child buried beneath rubble
needs a beacon.
As if a lynched man’s mother
is waiting for a softer sentence
to survive the weight of what happened.
The cities are coughing blood.
Rivers carry ash like scripture.
Names decide who gets buried faster.
Entire neighbourhoods learning
that smoke has dialects.
And you,
safe in distance,
soft in comfort,
protected by the privilege
of not being inside the fire,
sit under warm café light
manufacturing optimism
like a counterfeit drug.
Because privilege is not only wealth.
Sometimes it is distance that looks like wisdom.
So you tell the dying,
darkness ends.
Storms pass.
Humanity heals.
Tell that
to mass graves.
Tell that
to children who recognise drones
before constellations.
Tell that
to countries rotting inward
while poetry sprinkles glitter on gangrene
and calls it resilience.
And the romantics are no better.
They excavate private heartbreaks
while public reality is dismembered in daylight.
As if bullet holes in walls
can be patched later,
but feelings demand ceremony now.
But bodies do not wait for metaphor.
Collapse does not pause for phrasing.
And still, poetry arrives.
Late. Polished. Harmless.
As if naming it
was the same as stopping it.
Some poems perfume the wound.
Others force it open.
One tells you the cost of surviving the catastrophe.
The other refuses to let catastrophe become scenery.
And maybe neither changes a thing.
Maybe cities still burn.
Maybe children still vanish beneath concrete.
Maybe blood continues its ancient argument with soil.
But honest language, at the very least, interrupts comfort.
It stains the hands of people
trying to consume suffering
without touching consequence.
Because there is a difference
between holding a mirror to fire
and painting sunsets above it.
Neither may save the world.
But only one is willing to have a conversation.
That is the first failure:
confusing witness with intervention.
The second is worse:
confusing language with escape.
Because language prefers escape.
It can turn anything into distance.
It can make fire look like imagery.
It can make death sound like meaning.
It can turn catastrophe
into something discussable
instead of something that refuses discussion.
And when everything is burning,
you should at least write what you see,
what your ashen world actually feels like,
instead of cooking fiction
like chicken broth in a clean kitchen
while the stove outside is rubble.
Because even that softness
is a form of violence.
And still, when your own country burns,
you continue writing hope
as if hope is proof of resistance.
But it is often just refusal
to stay inside reality long enough
for it to finish speaking.
Another matchstick
explaining fire.
Another poem
confusing distance with morality.
But perhaps this poem is no exception either.
Another man arranging collapse into sentences,
mistaking articulation
for resistance.
Because what is outrage
if not grief
trying to survive its own volume?
What is poetry
except language
trying to justify its own survival
inside a world that no longer requires explanation?
Fire does not respond to description.
The dead do not translate.
And maybe that is the final humiliation,
that all poets:
the hopeful,
the romantic,
the furious,
are not opposites.
Just different ways
of refusing silence
in a world that has already finished speaking
in irreversible events.
Some will call it hope.
Some will call it truth.
Some will call it grief.
Because naming things
is cheaper than holding them.
And one of them will still keep writing
as if language is action
and action is still available.
Not because it saves anything.
Not because it changes anything.
But because even collapse
has its own habit of expression.
Some failures arrive dressed like comfort.
Some arrive dressed like clarity.
One is pornography.
The other is poetry.
And don’t be fooled,
both are performances.
One admits it is selling flesh.
The other insists it is selling light.
And the audience applauds
whichever one hurts less to recognise.
Because nobody wants truth.
They want arrangement.
They want damage
but only as an evening snack.
They want blood
filtered through language
so it doesn’t stain their hands
while they read it.
And poets oblige.
We always do.
We reduce reality
until it becomes survivable.
Like chicken broth made in a clean kitchen
while the stove outside is still rubble.
And even that metaphor
is just another way
of making catastrophe polite.
So yes,
you can call it awareness.
You can call it witnessing.
You can call it courage
if it helps the sentence stand upright.
But it does not change the outcome.
Nothing here is being saved.
And when everything becomes language competing with silence,
you begin to notice the simplest truth:
silence is winning
in every direction that matters.
So perhaps
your poetry and mine alike,
our trembling little sermons
about hope,
or heartbreak,
or horror,
are not resistance at all.
Just noise
trying to pass itself off as meaning
while reality continues
without translation.
And in the end,
it all collapses into the same final equation:
what we call insight
what we call art
what we call truth
doesn’t even rise to tragedy.
It just sits there:
warm, uninvited, and irrelevant
like the piss
of a pregnant toad.
