Chicken Broth At The End Of The World

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.