They raise their flags on broken stone, call every theft a “coming home,”
but every town they touch turns cold.... a kingdom built on borrowed bone.
The pipes cough mud where rivers ran, the taps spit rust, the cisterns fail;
children lift their empty cans to gods who never lift the pail.
The fields lie blistered, grain stripped thin, the silos gutted, soil undone;
an empire feeds its core within and leaves the outer rings to none.
The houses taken, names erased, the “ownerless” reclassified;
a clerk in epauletted haste moves in before the tears have dried.
The boilers freeze, the wires die, the winter chews through every door;
the bills arrive, the heat is lies.... in cold of minus twenty-four.
Garbage climbs in thawing heaps, filth threads through fractured sewer;
the state that claims a people’s soul won’t keep their water running pure.
They pave a street for camera eyes, paint murals on a shattered wall;
the Potemkin grin, the staged reprise.... the rot behind it eats them all.
This is the archipelago: a chain of ruins, linked by lies;
a map of reach without repair, a flag that ***** but never dries.
And still they chant “forever ours,” as if a slogan could replace
the work of tending human lives.... the daily bread, the warming grace.
But empire is a brittle frost, a rime that spreads until it breaks;
and every ruin that they claim is one more crack the winter makes.
[email protected]
1 March 2026