Our Sorriest Cloak

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