when you blame yourself for bills and bad actors that flood your living space on the regular, that seep through holes in your pocket as the robots of repossession block your view of a system that was in place long before your parents existed
when the worst of alleged leaders and candidates for the undead swear the blood on their teeth was donated by voluntary victims who died happy, and you can too
when you realize a loved one has been enticed to entertain themselves to death and even those that show up at the funeral can’t wait to get back to their couches and screens
when you argue with enforcers in your family about a world where everyone has enough food and lives sheltered from darkness and the rough weather of a heat-stroke power grid
when private plane preachers exchange crabs-in-a-barrel sermons with each other and those who lie about the pain unto death and removal of the colonized and enslaved as they blame harriet tubman and urban farmers for seeking justice and relief
when justice and relief, the tangled roots of love become barely visible after rainy days at your neighbors’ doors where you hold nearly invisible flowers, invitations to gather and reclaim ourselves
when the descendants of slave catchers and indian killers cross the fake barriers to join the uprisings against genocide in all of its manifestations
when you unschedule so called time-off to be yourself, to heal in the color and gender of boundless human connection
when you barely sleep through alarms of war and plague to rise weary, pretend to smile and join others whose eyes may be bewildered and bloodshot, whose brains would rather shuffle than flow and still say,
yes, i’m fine, because you need them to be fine, because we all need each other to make a new day
Read his book: The Official Report on Human Activity https://wsupress.wayne.edu/9780814345207/
