Content Warnings for: Suicide, violence, death, death of children
I wanted to say that the plutocratic white supremacist hatemongering plague pustules commonly called the GOP were nothing if not persevering assassins:
What they started with lax gun control laws and inflammatory rhetoric,
They finished by gaslighting traumatized babies
Into completing the work for them.
I want to say this but it is a hollow comfort,
As if there was a single evil Death Star,
To blow our way to victory
And not a hydra of constantly evolving horror to cauterize.
They didn’t invent the toxic patriarchal system that leaves
Room only for bullets, never tears,
Capitalism existed before they used it like a cartoon anvil flattening us into despair discs,
And in the end,
It is OUR silence that reloads the rifles, our desire
Not to be involved, keep our heads down,
They make it so easy for us to point fingers
At their pasty Palpatine faces, but there are more of us:
Our apathy makes us actively complicit.
And this blood suffocating our poors, I mean our pores
is no more or less
OUR crime than the black city babies or the Native women
Or the South East Asians silenced by our selective mutism,
So I am not picking a favorite martyred cause, but
One social sacrilege is more likely to kill me, therefore
Let me add this caveat:
When I die, probably still poor and anxious, afraid I add nothing of value,
I wish to compensate for the inadequacy of my existence by being mulched
For trees or better yet, a mushroom garden.
Let my flesh become oysters and chantrelles,
Let my soul travel through the mycelium to pulse with an earth
Waiting to become its own corpse,
Eat me if you wish, dry, stewed, or ideally
Sauteed in wine and butter, just as I was in life,
Or leave me for the fairies to dance in, but let me reincarnate
As luscious dirt…
Unless
Should I die at work, in my classroom, surrounded by frightened 8th grader
Who previously stressed most about progress reports and puberty,
If I am gunned down by a child the world could not love enough to life so he
(and it WILL be a he and he will look like me)
Hated us all to death, if the cylinders of his frustration weep from a weapon
Barely fit for a soldier, if the last thing I see as a screaming symphony
Becomes the background soundtrack of my tragic death
Before it is washed away by the next news cycle, is a demon toy
Legally purchased and easily taken by hands still learning to type,
I hereby give my expressed, explicit permission to have my corpse
Dumped on the steps of fucking Congress.
If my body cannot be fungal nutrients, it can be the log
Fertilized with their bullshit and maybe just this one time,
‘Thoughts and prayers’ can be transmuted
Through the alchemy of my white woman stigmata
To actual change until future children
Can grow in the sun like sequoias, instead of huddling
In the shadows like truffles, dug out and poached until they bury
Themselves, still chased by phantoms.
Leave my broken, useless frame as a testimony
That they are not alone, that none of this was their fault,
Let me symbolize the failure WE have passed
On to them like measles and climate change and debt
And let this indictment haunt our moral starved marionnettes
Like hellish furies.
If I cannot be food for mycolophilies, let me at least be food for thought
Royal Rose 