We

By Ali Alizadeh

“The political struggle is also the struggle for the appropriation
             of words.”
                             Jacques Rancière  

We are decent. We love our country
and our liberty. We earn a living

off the profits of thingifying nature
for rich trading partners who pay us

with the blood of terrorised workers. We hear
the chitchat between the puppets

of capital (Prime Minister & Opp. Leader)
and give our consent to their triviality

via free and fair elections. We dream
of feeling happiness as psyches rejoice

at buying iPads and designer socks, a life
finally expiating its futility

with a 2% pay rise. We purr
when coddled in the arms of a community

founded on culture and religion, hiding
hatred behind the mask of heritage. We

are really as pathetic as that? I wake
up early (or surrender to my insomnia)

to daydream about another we: the people
flummoxed by so much fantasy, struggle

and wander toward the truth of an Event
after the idea of equality, for a humanity

that won’t be conditioned by a pronoun
when we are the name of the immeasurable

power to rupture the reality of the world
and instigate new worlds, the traces of eternity.

This Poem Features In: