The Idiot's Manifesto

I've been writing —

putting words together,

stitching them whimsically

into rather disjointed strings,

piling them atop one another

and pretending it’s art

and revolution in the same sentence —

since I was a freshly realized teenager.

A decade and another ten years later,

I’ve hopped from one form to another,

genres to the lack thereof,

with words as both palette and pellets.

From hopeful, heartbroken rodeos

to full-fledged misanthropic arson,

I’ve travelled words at length and in breadth —

across tongues, grammars, and skins.

Hundreds and hundreds of unnecessary poems

I’ve often contemplated undoing.

Millions of dead, decayed, and dwindling revolutions

bled off pens onto pages

and into paperbacks few have read,

fewer still remembered,

and nearly none have lived —

save for a handful of rebellious idiots

who thought words could cure malign

and carve a benign world —

but forgot that people’s worlds

begin and end with people.

And people don’t change — only revise.

And revolution is uncouth

to a species obsessed with cosmetic quick-fixes.

Nothing has changed.

Nothing will.

You and I will waste

a few thousand more words

out of the millions of trees

already fallen to our need to be enough.

Some will fall to the fallacy —

yours and mine —

of a world built and rebuilt in words.

Words spoken,

words penned —

lost and found

and lost again,

in translation.