Manifesto in Blood and Bone
No more the polite silence,
the crossing of streets when brutality passes by in uniform.
No more the swallowed scream when the baton cracks against skull,
when the child's body washes up on foreign shores like driftwood, like nothing.
We have been domesticated into witnesses, neutered into audiences applauding our own erasure,
but the throat remembers how to roar.
Look: there is a woman in Tehran with her hair burning like a flag.
There is a man in Gaza digging through concrete for his daughter's shoe.
There is always someone's mother being dragged across asphalt,
her spine a xylophone played by the state's fist.
Somewhere, right now, a tongue is being severed for speaking.
Are you listening? Or are your ears filled with the elevator music of compliance?
Join hands, they say,
as if our fingers weren't already bloodied from clawing at prison walls,
as if our palms weren't already raw from pounding on the doors of indifferent embassies.
But yes, join them anyway.
Make a fist.
Make a barricade of flesh.
Make a human chain so thick that tyranny chokes on it.
Every empire is built on the foundation of crushed windpipes.
Every border is a scar where human was severed from human.
Every law that denies dignity is a funeral we're forced to attend in our best clothes, smiling.
I refuse. I refuse the script.
I refuse to be grateful for crumbs of freedom while the banquet of justice rots untouched.
You want peace?
Then rage.
Rage like a forest fire against the drought of compassion.
Rage until your voice becomes a weapon,
until your silence is no longer mistaken for consent.
They will call you extremist,
radical, threat to order, good.
Order is just another word for who gets to kneel and who gets to walk on backs.
This is not a poem asking for your empathy.
This is a brick through the window of apathy.
This is every language screaming the same word: enough.
Enough of the disappeared.
Enough of the unmarked graves.
Enough of calling murder "collateral."
Enough of swallowing our teeth and calling it civility.
So take this hand.
Take every hand that trembles with fury,
that refuses to wave white flags.
We are the uprising your history books will sanitise.
We are the riot your grandchildren will romanticise.
We are here, now,
howling at the machinery of oppression until our throats bleed revolution,
until the walls remember they were built by us and can be torn down the same way,
together, with our bare and furious hands.
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