Hope Doesn't Mean Shit To The Dying

I want to write about birds and bees.

Not the kind circling funeral pyres,

wings crisped into ash before they even taste nectar. 

I want to write about birds and bees, 

the mythical kind, 

the ones born from clouds, unshackled by smoke,

singing in a sky that does not choke,

their feathers unplucked by tainted yesterdays,

their songs not yet sold to the highest bidding liar.

I want to write about mountains.

Not the ones drilled hollow by hopeless miners,

or claimed by thrones counting offerings like blessings.

I want to write about mountains

where silence tastes like eternity,

and echoes have teeth that bite the adulterated hands of conquest,

where shadows rise and kneel to no crown,

where rocks remember their own names.

I want to write about seas.

Not these oil-slick bellies vomiting drowned bones,

but the tranquil kind, 

where waves rise for themselves,

not as metaphors for the damned,

where water dreams untouched,

and storms build and break, only for their own sake.

I want to write about love stories.

Not in dug up streets paved with manholes for bribes, 

government's towers of gold, I call them.

I want to write about love stories

in the hollow of caves, under trees that have watched centuries,

where boy meets girl, girl meets boy,

their mouths speak without fear,

their hands touch without permission slips,

and no shadow measures their heartbeat.

I want to write about hope.

But every skin that offers it these days

come in the flesh of impostors

who wrap it in mirrors and velvet lies,

calling it poetry.

It isn’t poetry.

It’s pornography for the gleefully ignorant,

ritualized and choreographed,

with orgasms for mandates, 

because reality is too ugly to endure,

and every cheap praise is payment for silence.

Every day

every fucking day

something else burns.

A truth, a temple, a farmer’s throat,

an inconvenient question,

a journalist’s ribs.

Each flame struck with an assumed king’s grin.

Each ash heap a carnival of forgetting.

Tyranny does not march anymore

it glides, 

varnished in colors of crowns,

and the patience of serpents coiled in gold.

And to those who write of imagined fantasies

while the world burns beneath their quills

and to those who wrote of a midnight summer's dream, 

the painted seas, the untouched mountains, the singing birds and bees, 

I promise I will write of the same,

the day they are the ones ripped apart,

torn by fire and blade, by greed and silence,

because fuck justice.

I will take the freshly spilled blood of hypocrisy and bigotry any day,

let it stain my lines, let it carve my verses,

let it scream the truth that these trembling nobodies do not want to whisper.

I wish

I could write about birds and bees,

mountains or seas,

timeless love or quiet hope.

But I can't.

Not when the air tastes of smoke and blood.

Not when laughter walks on stilts,

carrying the weight of the absent.

Not when freedom is a mannequin

dressed in ceremony,

while its throat bleeds obedience.

But someday, 

if the birds sing without choking,

if the mountains breathe without conquest,

if the seas dream without drowning,

if the lovers kiss without shadows rehearsing,

and the gods remember their own names, 

then, maybe then,

I’ll write about them.

The day they exist for themselves,

without smoke on their backs,

without debts to memory or ledger,

without a clearance certificate

from mistresses for ministers,

without the voices of charred dreams ticking like a metronome.

Until then, 

every poem I try to write about beauty

bleeds the stink of fire.

Every metaphor I birth

screams with charred wings.

Every line coughs up the black bile

of a world that refuses to be silent,

where even angels wear armor,

and silence itself has sharpened edges.

The world burns.

And you sip from goblets of curated hope,

call it poetry, call it vision,

call it anything but the slaughter it hides.

Every orphaned child, 

every scorched field, 

every silenced throat,

it is genocide in slow motion,

and your painful pointlessness 

disguised as poetry

is the knife’s handle.

I watch.

I write.

With hands scorched,

with lungs filled with smoke,

with a spine that refuses to kneel,

that would rather break than bend,

I shall continue to name

every lie, every charred truth, every act of complicity

because the sky will not forgive,

and the earth will not forget.