You sit at your screen
fingertips flying in the face of decency
like a spigot attached to a vat of arsenic
dripping your poison, slowly, surely into the ears of the unthinking.

You justify the burnt skin, the orphans, the unending torture as deserved.

Deserved?

How can it be so?

Go tell the orphan, scarred and screaming that her fate was deserved.

Go stand beside mass graves and thumb your nose at the deserving corpses, stained by the blood of ages.

Where is your heart? 
does it choke and sputter,
buried beneath your all encompassing loathing?

You call me stupid, maybe so,
my views naive, my compassion wasted
yet my heart beats proudly, swells with love 
while my tired eyes drown at the unfolding horror.

War is not a spectator sport,
it is not justifiable, nor deserved.

Call me stupid if you will, ridiculous if you must
call me any number of names in your attack on my spirit
I will not care, I will not bend or bow.
Your hatred will be your undoing.
Not mine

Cash registers and sleepy morning smiles
swept with the exciting smell
of new-old things.

He greeted me at the end of the line and  
I asked him how he was-

          "Cant you tell? I'm radiating with joy!
           Every breath in my chest is a light
           charged and glowing through my bones.
           My throat is sore from laughing,
           my cheeks from smiling,
           and it's the sweetest pain I've ever known."

   -and he was.

We can only know what we want to know
hear what we want to hear
most don't want to show their pain or their fear

we can only say what we want to say
see what we want to see
most don't want to pay a backlashing fee

we can only show what we want to show
make it all disappear
most don't want to know what we see and hear