Tag: USA
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Officer Eddie Price
A father holding court paperwork,asking for help to find his child.Eddie Price didn’t see a father.He saw an inconveniencestanding in the open air.So he pulled the chemical spray.He threw the punch.He took a desperate man downwhose only crime was demanding help.Strip away the badge,strip away the gun,and all that remainsis a bully hiding behind power.
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The Spectacle of State-Sanctioned Death
I sat down today to write a poem about the latest news: the Pentagon, under Pete Hegseth, plans to livestream an execution. I couldn’t write it. The words felt too small, too quiet for something so brazenly grotesque. If a country insists on retaining something as fundamentally barbaric as the death penalty, it should, at…
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Steel on the Sky
We traded moonshots for a crosshair. The Pentagon just cleared the sky, converting orbits into armourso even star-lit dreams can die. No longer curious or boundless, just high ground for a brand-new threat. We drag our earthly paranoia up where the sun has never set. A launch sequence for paranoia, satellites built to strike and…
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City of New York Directive: No Good Deed Penalty Schedule
City Hall updated the municipal code: Every good deed gets a line-item fine. You breathed the dust to pull out the dead? You’ll pay for it on the instalment line. Twenty-five years of compounding interest on lungs full of glass and pulverised stone. The city takes pride in its braves and its best, then leaves…
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Fourth of July
An old charter sat on its pedestal, edges worn from years of hands that claimed to honour it. Lately, a few visitors have begun lifting pieces from it; small ones, easy to pocket, easy to pretend were never there. The pedestal still stands. The room still applauds. But anyone looking closely can see what’s missing,…
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If The Newsroom Was a British Show
I love Aaron Sorkin’s show, The Newsroom. I think it’s one of the best pieces of television ever made. It’s also a show with a truly incredible opening sequence, wherein the main character lays out why the United States of America is, despite the propaganda, not the greatest country in the world. Here’s the clip:…
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The Parade of Polished Shoes
They polished the shoes and bent down to praise,they hung clever posters and learned all the plays.A drum got louder, a march found a beat,and neighbours began nodding in tidy, clean rows in the street. They offered neat answers with ribbons and bows,promised order, clean lists, and fewer of those.But maps made of rules leave…
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The Rise
(Inspired by, and to the tune of, The Day the Nazi Died by Chumbawamba) They said it couldn’t happen here,they said the threat had passed;that fascism was a relicin a history book at last. They told us we were safe now,that the danger had been slain,but the day we stopped believingwas the day it rose…
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The Ballad of the Vanishing Spine
They say the Capitol’s tremblinglike a fiddle in the rain,’cause the man in the big chair’s shoutingand the echoes rattle the pane.And the folks who swore to guard usjust smile and toe the line;you’d think they’d lost the ledgerwhere once they kept their spine. They check the polls at sunrise,run the numbers twice by noon,draft…