"I Dare Not Wonder"

I think about death more as it relates to life, as a time to learn and to reflect, to change if need be before time runs out. Some people act as if we live forever, boasting when they do harm. It terrifies me to think of all my own blindspots, that I might live to regret my denial in all its sickening forms. Despite the unwitting harms we do, most people have a kind of light that surrounds them, a terrifyingly beautiful glow that draws others nearer when the fray of living might otherwise divide us. For the callous few that rule us, their aura is a twisted red greed, more like an inpenetrable shell, baiting, using, punishing the courageous among the have-nots. As of late, my countrymen grow hungry like refugees scraping in the ditches of a war-torn country for discarded scraps. We are prisoners, the occupying force not foreign but domestic, an oppressive white regime dominant throughout our history. The glow of empathy has slowly been drained from our collective conscience by their brutality, and we grow ever desperate for change, increasingly brutal in our own right, though we are not unjust in the way we protest. We do not retaliate against the vulnerable, nor steal from the poor as they do. We do not fear losing privelage or live terrified beyond steel compound walls. We are the survivors that become the inevitable resistance when power does not listen, kills us in the name of the law, as it lies, projects, and reifies that WE are its enemies. Power never sees the apparent illusion of being held indefinitely and there will be be no warning when it's lost.