The thing about paper bullets is,
they make bullet holes of papercuts,
then cut right through
the heart of the gaping void.
Where once was all blood and tissue,
now stands a giant wormhole
of absconding matter.
Where once was a throbbing, pounding epiglottis,
now rests a dehydrated raisin
of bled-out larynx.
And if you thought
paper couldn't
buy you, bury you, and buy your burial
at the very same instant,
you sure have never
cashed a paycheck,
been in an autopsy room,
or watched empires fall.
You sprawl seven thousand two hundred and thirty-nine words laid out in spleen-stained sheets,
your handcrafted paper origami of yourself, that you peddle on the internet,
hurl slogans like the madman at the traffic signal hurls abuses at nothingness;
you swirl dirt and dust into the blurred lines of disdain and disguise it as revolution,
over the rotting flesh of lives damned and devoured by depravity.
And you think you have moved worlds,
like they were globes spinning on your fingertips,
and you think you have brought mountains down,
like earthquakes bringing homes, housed in mortar and concrete,
down to dust and debris.
Do you think they died
with their entrails dug out and their ribs caved in
so they could be an asterisk in your tainted tale of an existence?
Somewhere beneath your carefully arranged outrage,
beneath the metaphors, the manifestos,
the magnificent little catastrophe you have mistaken for an identity,
there is a simpler obscenity:
they were lives;
you needed them to become your literature,
you needed their deaths to become your significance.
Tell me —
what species does that make you?
The ones on the inside
and the ones on the outside
always have the same thing to say:
"We are in the right lane,
they aren't."
Temple, church, mosque.
Continent, country, colour, class.
Government, asylum, jail.
Change the latitude.
Change the longitude.
Homo sapiens barely changes its certainty.
"We" are always on the right side of the border.
