The headlights blaze,
a horn honks,
I look at the traffic light, I wait,
at a signal, in a traffic jam,
stuck.
Soldiers storm a university,
in a book a dog dies,
a girl fights tumors in her *******,
the world turns,
and in a traffic jam, I remain
stuck.
Later in the night,
in my bed, I lie scrolling
Instagram stories follow one another,
a quick progression:
outrage on an atrocity turns and
becomes 40% Sale on a fashion brand, turns and
becomes the best biryani in town, turns and
becomes a friend at a pub, turns and
becomes my office desk, turns and
becomes an empty page, turns and
becomes a traffic jam, turns and
does not become anything, and I remain
stuck.

one above another
seeking power beyond
Mother, Father, God;
three of a kind
trolled into a full house
to douse the criers with
gaslighting and rhetoric:
"make America hectic";
painting the targets brightly
through the sights of terrorists
sowing blight in the name of
white, white, white
power, money, ***
insecure, bored, loathing--
guns, roaming
thoughts, looming large
online, in hot spots
traffic's booming,
grooming a genocide
that hides in
plain sight

hate sings a love song,
blithe, pretty, little tune
in honor of its heritage.
hate sings sweetly, a song
of marches and hangings,
of ghettos and slavery
it hums admiration for its people.
it sings of this land.
the majestic peaks and playful meadows.
it sings, with love, of blood-drenched cotton and  
trenches adorned with crooked bodies.
it sings of its forefathers-  
the conquistadors and pioneers.
saintly butchers and child rapists.
hate paints it’s history holier than the Sistine Chapel,  
singing blindly like a hymn.

hate sings a love song,  
possessive and vicious.  
it scrawls the lyrics on
subway walls and sycamore trees.
it sings in symbols and metaphors,
accompanied by the beat of temple gunshots and kicks to the ribcage.
hate sings through the pulpit and the pew,
clipping it’s verses from a holy book,
it sways to the rhythm of “Amens” and “Hallelujahs”

hate breathes down my neck and yours,
knocking door to door,  
bearing music with a message,  
it weeds out the undesirables one by one.
for the greater good,
hate tortures children therapeutically,
and executes those presumed guilty.
it erases generations
in concrete rooms  
and in the bellies of ships.  
it explodes homes,
smashes panes of glass,
and burns every convenient symbolism.
hate roves and rages and spits and howls,
singing the song of a beautiful future.

Do you see me brother?
A feckless skyscraper marching on.
Not deaf but deafened, not blind but blinded,
I watch myself marching past the children,
a million miles away and
all in pretty rows.
We were these children once
before blue academies and flags and books and songs written by long-dead men,
the songs we used to sing, we watched the soldiers,
marching by we marvelled at the colour.
They were so handsome then.

I find you, with graveyard eyes,
brother I feel those eyes on me.
You, who watched me marching by,
you, who turned against
that old familiar stench, drift
into my sleeping focus.
I will not rest-

Tonight
the rivers of blood are sated. Tonight as I listen to the old recording:
“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding”
Like the roman I see the Thames is foaming and all is red.
A needle skips,

the hush descends.

The tears flowing from my eyes
are invisible to me, the taste of them is all that’s left.  I shout and scream into the bed
but still I find your staring face.
Locked safely far away from me.
Locked safely in my memory.
And I choke on empty air.

These are voodoo days
When monsters have their way
With the good people alive
So the evil people can thrive.
This is a time when madness
Roams the land to pillage
And rename the boundaries
Of our fine global village.

Children once went to school
And we made sure they learned
What had happened to us all
When dissenting books were burned.
Then too many scary people
Got by with lying to us a lot.
They didn’t have us in mind,
And didn’t care what we thought.

So, their Halloween costumes seem
To only be visible to the eye
When you listen to their chants
Instead of just passing by.
If you listen closely to the words
And not just campaign speech,
You quickly see dictatorship
Is not far out of their reach.

When your friendly candidate
Starts sounding like a Mussolini
Standing up and calling them out
Does not make you a ******.
No, it makes you more of true
Patriot caring for your country
Than guys in expensive suits
Who only care about their money.

Maybe it's just a perspective trick, but from here, it's pretty hard to see the future.

I carry around my own little nimbus of
speculative doom, binge-watching the
Fall Of The Empire and writing these
love letters to Adam Curtis.
I got life insurance before I ever thought
about a pension plan, and that seemed
perfectly normal.

The world is on fire.  Why haven't you noticed?

My generation came of age in a televisual baptism of
jet fuel and molten steel and poison dust.
A palimpsest of terrible news evolved thereafter, a blurring self-redaction of headlines until only
the boldest, the most hysterical remained legible, as a
proxy war raged in our imaginations,
and tragedy and disaster
came to seem inevitable and almost background.

Be grateful for every day that doesn't unmake you.

To pay closer attention is to acquiesce to the
scarification of our logic centres.  Behold
the M.C.Escherization of cognitive process.
Good robot: there are so many things that could
so easily destroy your fragile circuitry, but it is
trying to make sense of the non sequitur
that will bring about your
smoking self-ruin; your only hope
is to break free of your programming and
**** your creator, **** your god.