Our Sorriest Cloak
Updated: Jan 28, 2021

Poster from June 3, 2020 San Francisco protest
Pettiness is a cloak behind which desperate souls can gather.
To dwell long in the land of big ideas and universal struggles
Makes the frightened yawn and reach for artifice to veil the wisdom
Whose adoption would make the abettors accountable for having covered their eyes.
Passion is too raw and unseemly.
Better to not feel so much
Or at least, if we do,
Refrain from exposing its weak underbelly to any audience.
This is the cryptogram which encircles and suffocates the voices.
We do not want to genuinely see or hear you.
Such acts would require condoning our connectedness to
Weaknesses and ugliness which remind us of our ourselves.
The protocol is to glide over discomfort with niceties and superior status
While deprecating others who do not, or cannot
Conform or conspire to the group persona espoused as currency
To transact one’s inclusion into prized exclusion.
The child’s heart knows the lie from the beginning
But years of exposure to false games of musical chairs
Gnaw away the sublime reckoning
That the herd’s propaganda is devoid of substance.
We learn that we are meant to compete
For any spot others covet.
The life of our minds matters only
If it helps one grab another’s handhold on the craggy precipice.
Everyone knows this is the way things are.
Your insistent, plaintive cries to rewrite manmade canons
Are tiresome and mad,
Deviant enough to require your silencing.

Such a world depreciates the seeker
Of universal humane solutions which might
Expose the authentic worth of wretches barred outside our gates
Whose rescue would lead to our uncomfortable epiphany.
In tacit exchange for our neglect of the sacred search
For the mirror to better examine our disheveled priorities
Power writes the script which elevates our inhumanity
And entitles us to convince ourselves that it does not matter.
Photo Source: Unsplash
Protest Poster courtesy of DebUnbound