The calender reads 2016
But its feels more like 1984
Have you heard the crying
The American dream
Lying dying in the streets
While big brother
Is strapping blinders
On our heads
And shackles to
Our hands and feet
Were being lined up
By the rows
Willing prisoners
Of the slave power
Empire of minimum wage
Shuttling our children
Off to the animal farm
Market of big business
And big lies
***** water mixed
In with the rotting
Apples of the
New American pie
The sugar isn't sweet
To the starving
In the street
While trash cans
Over flow in the back lots
Of the super market
Super chains
Of the slave power
Empire of criminal rage
And its the cold dark waters
Of nuclear waste
Soaking the pages of the calender
That reads
2016
In these days that feel like
1984
No kindness or compassion
For hands shaking tin cups
Needing just a little change
Just a little shelter
From their sad weather lifes
Living on the cold ground
Below our overpass ways
No shelter and no change
No compassion and no kindness
In the fist and pockets
Of the slave power
Empire of ignorant ways
Bullets, bombs and hate
Harvesting fresh blood
For the ink
To print the pages of the calender
That reads
2016
As politicians write us back
Into the pages of the days of
1984

There's no Pokémon
here in Rio, much like our
clean drinking water.

They shot a lot of black men,
this year.

Men with power and uniforms.
They were shot, too.

Schools were bombed
bullets scattered
& teachers, like me, had panic attacks practicing
drills, imagining their students’ bodies
riddled with shrapnel.

& we argued about gun control,
racism,
immigrants,
walls.

Injustice permeated the coffee I drank to calm myself.
Sorrow waltzed along the edges of cheerful conversations
in the grocery store.


White men and women took to platforms,
insisting their version of justice could correct
the suffering.

No one really believed them.
Presidency became a mockery
Division made more clear.


Over three hundred died in Baghdad,

no one flew their flag.

Maybe we were tired of avatars with flags of nations other than our own.
all suffering.
Perhaps so much compassion was overwhelming.
It could be that skin color meant more than I thought.


The skin color I wore,
Light, spattered with freckles,
made my compassion a condescension.
--how could I understand?