‘Monumental‘ By Carlos Yosten
For a brief moment
A new sun appeared,
The marvel of the modern world.
Several Hundred Thousand degrees fahrenheit.
And thus began a new
Chapter of fear,
A modern imperialism,
Driven by capital & shareholder interests.
The jungle impedes,
Slash & burn, soil churns,
Igniting class schisms.
Eden consumed & exploited for profit.
Extract. Extract. Extract.
Blisters crack and bleed
From toiled hands of those who yearn
To break through their prison
Imposed by those colonial capitalists.
The indigenous,
The scorned laborer,
The peasant held by chains of gold
May dream of the day that the Oligarchs fall.
One too many missed
Meals or homes stolen.
Atrocities still left untold.
Desperation festers, kindling cause for the bold.
Resist. Resist. Resist.
Those seen as inhuman,
Propagandized against,
Targeted by a ruling caste
Who says it’s time to cut the grass.
So cut, and cut, and cut
They do.
A war of terror on people’s kindness and truth.
Dehumanize, radicalize, then expel.
A trauma within
Each new refugee
Arriving on the shores & ports
Of the same country that funds their genocide.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
This cycle of abuse,
Justification
For vengeance & cruelty.
Lest we forget what our ancestors endured.
Lest we forget that
They were the timid,
The poor and huddled masses
Beckoned by promises etched onto monuments.
Monuments which
Reflected an ideal
We have never quite lived up to.
An ideal so bold those with vast wealth fear it.
Thus,
We must try, & try, & try
To make this truly,
A land for the free.
‘The Eyes We Left Behind‘ By Travis Knight
They are the wild eyes you just deemed empty and irrelevant; a weary flash as you slid across some corner.
They always have the best advice for you; life-changing discourse. Yet their advice never seems to find its way to them.
They are the song that came soft and serenading right after they screamed in your face; Christianity meets murderous rage. Apparently, you are a pathological liar, but you are not. Just don’t tell them that.
They are selfish and selfless simultaneously; all their best wishes authentic. They really care about you until they forget that they care about you. Explosions of personalities and characters, and always the people who follow them—who steal from them—who gang stalk them.
They are a single-shot silence in a six-cylinder slumber; so long, my friend. Or the long, regret-ridden flight, swirling down until they run out of sky. Or an empty bottle of medicine meant to mend, an irony at its best. Or an overdose that finds the dark side of a lonely afternoon but can’t find its way back. They are goodbyes.
They are the laughs that they stir in you; they’re fantastic enablers of laughter. And while they perch lips and gasp for air, wading in internal pools, puddles pooled from their mind’s tears, you laugh. You laugh and laugh and laugh. For you, it’s just another laugh, a laugh you’ve taken for granted in your frown-forsaken day—fueling their fearless conflicts. And you miss the message from an entrepreneur of existence’s enigmas. You miss that.
They are walking up and down these halls; they’re walking off their ups and downs. It’s better than stillness, where trailheads for torment open up. Keep moving keep moving keep moving. They can never stop because when they do, it begins. And everything that begins must end. It must stop, so they stop without sight of a start. They are endings.
They are me on a bad day; I am them on a worse day. The relapse starts long before the relapse takes step. Way back when routine was ruptured and rendered as dissembled. As bad days stack, the weight leads them to worse days. And then I am them. And they are me. And we become everything. Everything except you.
They are lost childhoods or children they have lost; yes, in that order, explicitly. They are retired warriors, with limbs long gone and night terrors there to stay. They are stillborn souls stuck on sidewalk corners with no choice but to grow up fast, and see, and hear, and feel, and do unthinkable things. They are drugs, gathering strength with each passing solstice. They are regret and trauma, depression and hopelessness, mania and psychosis. They are the vacant voices rattling around a fissured skull. They are mourning that never meets mending. And mending that never had a chance to mourn. They are tragedy.
And when life inevitably snatches the rug out from under feet of folly, when it stomps you out, leaves you behind, stuck in sticky shadows, when you have finally shaken the hand of wit’s end, befriended, when the stars above extinguish all at once, once and for all, when the sun sets down, and the glowing moon gets stuck, when your toes have run out of sidewalk to step across,when open roads cease to calm calloused heels,when the running runs out of running, ran out,when you can go no more, nor would you try … they are you.
