I am become the poet of resistance.
I write like a comet, a solar flare,
A sawed-off shotgun,
And where my words no longer suffice
Let them mingle with my blood,
If you’re reading this I assume you don’t need to be convinced that Trump’s policy of separating children from their parents and throwing them into “detention centers” is an abomination, a violation of human rights, and further proof that his administration
What if you can’t do well do good?
What if my electric car
And diligent recycling
Mean less than nothing to
The slave-wage worker
They’ve separated 2,000 children.
No, they’ve discarded them
Like cans of Coca-Cola,
2,000 children who reached our shore
Like sea foam, salty, crying salt,
A column of families marching for asylum,
The squirrels were dancing in the trees
On a cataract of leaves
Occluding the moon,
And fields of tobacco slept
Like unlit dreams.
A cold river divides us:
Cold currents, cold fish, cold limbs,
A carnival of shattered ice
They traverse, barefoot,
With bleeding feet, frostbitten blood,
To risk a safari of lethal ice.
If I baptized ghosts
And knew that they were ghosts;
If I consorted with hallucinations
And accepted the pain of false association;
If I planted a Willow
America is the land
That without irony
Sells both the cigarette
And the nicotine patch.
It was late and the insomniac moon
Played cold music in my ears,
A seashell hum foot-tapping
To the beat of toss-turning dreams.
The night hangs low and shatters treetops
Like a brain bludgeoned against a wall,
Bone obliterated, thought incinerated,
Oozing toward the denuded earth,
And I resist.
Sleepless, restless, hopeless—yes.
Still I resist.