Selections from protest in verse.

methylation

4/8/2021

old world, new world

--it feels wrong to go on when other people cannot
to stand up amidst their frozen dreams
and keep walking towards your own

to find the world around you
as broken as the one you
      and your mother
              and her mother
left behind

and realize there is only one world:
a continuum of social fractures--

same old, same world

anthrapology

12/28/2020

hey you hinterloper
eat a word

eat
      my words
      used to be
            all flowers and vines

now I spit bone-chalk-
            distilled-acid rhymes--why?

I wear shadows like they’re skin
I swallow guilt like it’s honey

please embrace the scatter
for all else sums to nothing

--no trust in my core
leaves my faith in no one else

hey you New World
know what mandala spells?

my soul split eons before
                  you were born from division

looks like I fooled you all

I am in fact an engineered--
      nay, weaponized
Orientalist fever dream rhythm !

hey you comfortable body
subcontinent bones got your tongue?

colonial dissolution
got your fingers unspun?

well
t o u g h
            t u r f
you nascent walkers

learn from the spectrum --

  In the   s c a t t e r
I am centered

Read their stories
you’ll know better

(We forgive you)

Diamond Cut Diamond

4/3/2016

in this world,
you’ve got to fight
to feel. 

break your teeth on reality.

close your eyes 
and realize
only
diamond cuts diamond gets cut — 

only
blood on the outside speaks 
to anyone —
blood on the inside
is hallucination. 

every man
straw man
ghost man
living
in given-a-choice land

is dipped in delusion. 

only fed confusion in shards
to bruised minds.

Someone tell me 

what is time? 

the Clutches

6/21/2014

I
stick 
out 
like a green thumb
on a machine--
kick-stopped conveyor belts
and fell off
to be roped back up,
but I'll come off again.

My wheels, my clockface,
they'll come off--
monsoon enough.

When the weather is too much
to keep the factory steaming
and the sheep's wool white
with the smell of bleach:
the dictator,
the purveyor,
the pristine calculator

--of the family politic.