you silence the voices of the unseen ones
that would lead us to freedom.
You suffocate our ironclad wills
under mountains of
propaganda.
Sit down, shut up, step in line,
you say
strangling the fiery, singing thing in our bellies
that was born to disobey.
Given to cowardice,
you kill all your
tiny minds
cannot comprehend.
With fire and sword,
you purge us of our innocence
calling the lightning that flashes in our eyes
Satan.
God in heaven hates witches, you scream.
You will burn for eternity
if you dare to seize your now.
With your blasphemous religion, you cut off our conversation
with the God that
spins in the very molecules of the holy air
we breathe.
What must we pay
for your worthless label
of sanity?
How much of our flesh
must we carve away
before you deign to acknowledge our ethereal beauty?
Our very lives
the minutes the hours the days
that make up our existence
must be sacrificed on your altar,
our holy bodies atrophying in cubicles,
our brilliant minds withering,
crunching numbers endlessly.
Your lies have consigned us to futility.
Hypnotized, we stare at your screens,
pressing buttons like lab rats,
hungry for one more “like.”
Your sanity, dead ones,
is insanity,
a life cut off from all that is
striving for the airbrushed lie
you say should be,
a hopeless existence that prizes imaginary symbols
over tangible things,
invisible numbers in invisible bank accounts
over flesh and blood, breathing beings.
You live in the future
and the past
places that don’t exist
in reality.
And you call us crazy?
We are born whole,
but you convince us we are half of something,
bribing us with diamonds, dresses, and tiered confections,
injecting us with the infection of your fantasy,
consigning us to lives of lonely resignation,
marrying us to monsters,
calling this bondage love.
When the sacred dove visits,
we run
terrified of sinning
against an institution
based on the illusion of possession
of that which can never be possessed.
We are the next step in evolution.
Our DNA has granted us powers
you can’t comprehend.
You were born sightless
in a world of wonders,
so you gouge out the eyes
of the sighted ones
and brand their vision
lunacy.
Our miracles are not supernatural.
Five-hundred years ago
electricity would have been revered as sorcery.
So are we
science that has yet to be explained.
All is natural. All is magic.
You cannot understand what we see
anymore than an ant can understand
you.
Never mind, blind things.
We will rise on winds breathed by gods you deem long dead,
riding wings made from iridescent feathers you can’t see.
Our wise souls
will heal every cell in the body
of this convulsing, precious planet.
Quake not, trembling ones.
Ours is not an apocalypse of fire
but an ecstatic lifting
a ripping of the veil of illusion
to reveal the heaven
that is buried here even now.
There is no such thing as damnation.
You too will be saved.
Beloved, broken things, know this.
Underneath the lies you have believed, you are already perfect.
The nightmare is already ending.
When the top-40-hits and laugh tracks and freeways grow silent,
voices you are not yet equipped to hear
sing endlessly of dawn.
Burlesque Press 