Come, let us clog these streets with Democracy.
Let us grind the gears of our city to a halt,
with rust or sand or salt,
for the oily pitch of greed will set fire to our society.
Let us defend the last trees, in the last parks,
and peacefully organize:
bee-hive petition drives,
and ant-agonize those who would wield weapons for Liberticide,
with gasmasks plastered against our sweating skin and sea-wide eyes.
Bring mirrors and martyrs,
and songs and dance,
to remind the textbook-tweaking technocrats
and the plebeian police
that power burns to ash
quicker than a star’s collapse.
Sing the slogans of peace that provisionally linger,
like the harbingers of jailed journalists,
the ghetto echo behind the Great Firewall,
the whimpering of whispering whistleblowers,
the wi-fi televised riots,
the groans of our climactic climate,
the hockey-stick off-the-charts
and my heart, bless me, my heart.
It won’t stop beating so hard.
I care so much for people, it hurts to see them unequal
and set apart.
We are living in Orwell’s sequel,
but instead of a boot stamping on a human face, forever,
modern oppression mines our metadata until we surrender.
The devil is in the details and
I have read about a lot of demons.
I remember The MKUltra endeavour
willed by McGill’s own Dr. Cameron
to riddle and rattle students’ brains
with sensory deprivation and LSD,
to provide the CIA
with a manual
on how to scramble
rotten eggs.
Or do you remember when the bank HSBC
paid slap-on-the-wrist fees
to U.K.’s State attorneys,
so they could continue laundering the Sinaloa cartel’s
mockery of Mexican democracy?
Now, in the land of the Free,
dark money from Koch Industries
lines the pockets of the GOP,
who push fervently for the TPP
while calling it a harmless free trade treaty.
Truly, Empires have existed since the beginning of History.
Only now, they achieve victory through demands for “state secrecy”.
Some even employ economic hit men who sell fish-hook loans
so they can bankrupt and buy countries bearing the load
of land-filled landscapes
littered with warlords’ regrets
over ill-begotten toxic debts.
And if those fiscal fishers miss their markets,
jackals and juntas
or spies and spooks will disappear dissidents in the night.
O! What a tale to tell those marines
who fuel those machines of military might –
fighting the good fight.
So let us clog these streets with capital “D” democracy.
Let us sympathize with the pencil-pushing police
who must swallow pugilistic decrees
and smile the whole while
that we are all processed
like only so much meat.
So,
when we, the public, reconvene on the street,
we may sleep,
knowing the inner belly
of our city
is
well-fed
with all this
soylent
green
to eat.
By Michael Cody Clarke