Eight Minutes and Fourty-Six Seconds
Originally published on June 2, 2020
Trigger warning: The following poem is a manifestation of the traumatic events going on in the US right now. If you have enough trauma to deal with, please skip it. This is a strange contribution to this blog, but in some way that I don’t understand myself, it is also an outcome of my decades of engaging with Chinese medicine. Healing is political.
Eight Minutes and Forty-Six Seconds
Eight Minutes and Forty-Six Seconds
Sit with that and feel that knee!
Don’t shoot!
I can’t breathe!
He can’t breathe!
We can’t breathe!
He’s not moving!
Let him go!
Let him go!
LET HIM GO!!!!!!!!
Bastards! Motherfuckers! Animals!
Who is the animal?
Which animal would do such a thing?
Eight Minutes and Forty-Six Seconds
Equals 500 years
Equals how many lost, crushed, destroyed, exploited, maimed, tortured lives?
Profit over people.
Might makes right.
Domination, shit-hole countries, illegals, scum…
Good people on both sides?
Where are they now?
What are the sides?
Who or what is the enemy?
Love conquers all?
(that question mark hurts)
Eight Minutes and Forty-Six Seconds
When is the last time you have held your breath for
Eight Minutes and Forty-Six Seconds?
Hold a stranger’s hand for
Eight Minutes and Forty-Six Seconds.
Breathe slowly, inhale and exhale deeply for
Eight Minutes and Forty-Six Seconds.
How many tears do YOU cry in
Eight Minutes and Forty-Six Seconds?
In this so-called “civilized” country, we have rules for humane butchering and capital punishment.
(which, by the way, the rest of the “civilized” world considers barbaric and has long abandoned)
What color is the Kool-Aid?
Does it matter?
How do we get the poison out, detoxify bodies, souls, systems, communities, this whole fucking country, from centuries of domination under colonialism and capitalism?
We reap what we sow.
You plant bitter melons, you get bitter melons.
Look in the mirror!
Eight Minutes and Forty-Six Seconds
The bitter fruit of five centuries
… and the world is watching
as the fruit ripens and explodes, shooting its seeds of destruction all over
Eight Minutes and Forty-Six Seconds
When is the last time you have run for your life?
feared for your life?
begged for your life?
Eight Minutes and Forty-Six Seconds
each one an eternity, another brick on your neck,
of oppression, violence, cruelty, exploitation
of being used and abused.
Who let the dogs out?
When will this end?
(well it seems like, total destruction, the only solution)
Panem et Circenses, bread and circus, gladiator games all over again
Eight Minutes and Forty-Six Seconds
one man’s suffering all our suffering
May he rest in peace!
AND
May his suffering not be in vain!
