Anonymous
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a f t e r b u r n
11 . 06 . 2024
we should weave our burning fear and anger and grief and pain into braids so thick they can
lasso the white house and the pentagon and all the fucking marble monuments and tear this shit down
then the artists will get to work and knead their creative sparks into little seed bombs and
hand them to stunned bystanders to lob into the rubble and everyone can watch time lapse as all
the beautiful brown and green sprouts bring so many multicolored flowers that we
wonder why everything was always so white and sanitized and dull before
then the kids will get to play and of course it’s dangerous around all the rebar but they
surprise the older ones watching too closely with their ability to keep one another safe
as they remind us all why we’re alive and how, when you get hurt, you don’t hurt
someone else; you get a cast and you heal and you have everyone sign it
starting with the person who hurt you
then the engineers and builders will get to work, making plans for clearing the
debris and repurposing the still-standing structures and, with their standards no longer tied to the
overflowing wallets of real estate sharks, warhawks, and billionaire fuckheads,
they’ll listen to us this time and design and construct what we
want and need: community centers, free bookstores and libraries,
unconditional bathrooms, phenomenal public transit, bike lanes instead of accidental
right to maim alleys, schools and health clinics for everyone, and all the other
beautiful things we haven’t been free enough to imagine yet
then the teachers will get to work, showing us all how to be both smart and
free simultaneously, throwing away the
carefully crafted history and economics books that tried to convince us that this is the best we can do and hope for as a species
then the scientists will get to work, resolving our old problems in new ways,
the brightest of us no longer locked into thinking about how their innovations are
good for government or bad for business as if those
things were ever opposed
then the farmers and chefs will get to
work, growing and cooking for their neighbors the healthiest and freshest and tastiest foods
of a caliber that no mass
production or michelin star restaurant could ever match
then the healers will get to work,
healing our fresh cuts and hidden scars and there will be no more distinctions
between physical, emotional, and spiritual health because none of
us will be pathologized or manipulated anymore
then and only then and maybe after some more burning still the rest of us will get to live and we’ll live without the gnawing knowledge applied like before where we could only take or be taken from and we’ll learn to call a place home without owning it or taking someone else’s. away, unless. it was someone’s second, third, or hundredth and we’ll finally sit with the horrors of how many homes and lives have been taken in our names under a flag that means death to everyone who could not become part of our we but we will not dwell there and we will repair repair repair and we will become lovers of life, of surprising similarities, of sharing space and we will see the sacred in strangers and we will be practiced in solidarity, tying our struggles together like those knots that become impossible to undo and that will piss you off and make you ask a loved one for help but he will just shrug and say nope, that’s stuck like that forever now and we will have Palestinian pen-pals, our liberation elders, who keep teaching us how to love our enemy while overthrowing them at the same time and we will find our list of enemies shrink and our list of loved ones grow and we will let our loved ones change and grow, to be different than we have known each other before and we will no longer crave isolation for comfort or call upon authorities for safety because we will keep each other safe and we must keep each other safe and we have to keep each other alive and if you’re reading this, you deserve to be alive and so do i and i love you even though i only know part of you and you can love me even though i haven’t shown you all of me and maybe most of this is just some utopic thinking to cope with today but i call it dreaming so let’s call upon the desperate and desolate to dream and pull us all from yet another neverending nightmare
and like incessant candles lighting the way may we burn brighter afterward