I know why a caged poet screams
in my dreams at night─
anxiety.
It isn’t paranoia
when the planet floods and burns,
when a mad fascist’s finger
is on the nuclear trigger,
when empathy is the enemy
and wrong is right.
Masked gestapo
are rounding up our neighbors,
some have been murdered,
thousands are in concentration camps.
Tomorrow
it could be me or you.
Remember Lorca,
remember Victor Jarra.
The stuff of nightmares
is everywhere.
Far too many of us
go about our business
as if a cyclopean juggernaut
isn’t looming up around us,
herding us to the precipice.
If we are not anxious
we are not paying attention.
Does “Never Again for Anyone” mean anything to us?
Atrocities bombard our reality.
You don’t have to be Mel Brooks
to do high anxiety.
There should be millions of us
in the streets relentlessly, boots
on the ground with urgency
to demand a stop to this.
We have a responsibility to humanity.
We are the ones we have been waiting for to save us.