In the Year of Permutations

Go live with yourself after what you didn’t do.

Go and be left behind. Pre-package
your defense, tell yourself

you were doing
your oath, guarding the futility of

your corrupted good,

discerning the currency of some.

As if them over all else.
Over us.
Above God and Spirit.

You over me, you think.

This is no shelter in justice not sheltering with
enclosure of soft iron a sheltering of injustices
into an inferno flooding of your crimes committed
and sheltered by most culprit of them all.

These nesting days come
outward springs of truth,

dismantle the old structures,

their impulse for colony—I am done
with it, the likes of you.

To perpetrate.
To perpetrate lack of closure, smolders of unrest.
To perpetrate long days alone, centuries gone deprived.

To be complicit in adding to the
perpetration of power on a neck,
there and shamed,

court of ancestors to disgrace
you, seeing and to have done nothing.

Think you can be like them.

Work like them.
Talk like them.

Never truly to be accepted,
always a pawn.