Room and pillar
Let me be your guiding shaft
Atmospheric pressure
Let me be your natural draft

Atticus Finch
Let me be your inner last laugh
Cold determiner
Let me be your unsuspecting half

The sign in the window says
Closed until the light of day

Broken bone
Let me be your sling and marrow
Agitated Polaire
Let me be your tight-laced narrow

Confounded Plath
Let me be your children's tomorrow
Germ warfare
Let me be your biological sorrow

The word on the street is
Nothing's gonna change until the light of day

Open minefield
Let me be your measured step
***** mother
Let me be your usual suspect

Unwanted child
Let me be the tears when you last wept
Unwanted immigrant
Let me be the ground where you last slept

The writing on the wall signals
Critical times until the light of day

lumière du jour
Chérie

Love and confusion confounding the illusion of trust in a systematic regime which they deny ever existed but constantly promise to improve upon. The hat's shape and color may change, but our inability to exchange their deranged platforms for a stabler form of expression exposes our disillusion with dispossession and our embracing being complacent in the face of our rulers' all-encompassing corruption.

Went all these years without having an opinion worth sharing
Why would it change now?
To speak up is to be shut up
And to stand out is to be cut down.

Let me take a page out of the book that gave you every look you passed me when I went about my life the way that I was taught

If you had only gone as far as lit my cigarette and smiled I would have given up the world for you and your trials

When you find your rhythm let me know, but I feel that you were never searching for truths not in your bestseller book

I’m sitting here still waiting for a turn to speak, but you’ve stuffed your ears with amnesia of history; it makes you free

I’m here looking at the sky; it’s my way to feel free for a bit of time, and it doesn’t hurt anyone, unlike yours

We were never in line, and it’s all fine, until you cup my mouth with all the force you gained from never having to think twice

Now let me take a lie out of your book and make it choke on all the tears that could have drowned your pages and made you realize

Shy and soft-spoken though I might be, there are ways to talk without speaking a single word and it’s worth a thousand photographs

"Make yourself small
become invisible
until you are needed
don't take up space
starve yourself so that we find you appealing
cover and smear away
at your blemishes"
is the unspoken rule

Our bodies are not pitstops
for ravenous men
this flesh
these limbs
this ***** is a gift
and can be taken away,
just as it can be given

When they want you
docile and unassuming
seen but not heard
climb through the bars
of the prison you built
to please others
and make something of yourself
for in you alone, lies the power.
Esther L. Krenzin

We shall keep the poor poor.
We shall be on them like
a master's whip on the backs
of slaves;  but they will not
know us: we are too far and
too near. We shall use the
patois of patriotism to patronize
them. We shall hide behind our
flags, while we hold only one pole.
We shall have the poor fight our
wars for us, and die for us;  and
before they die, they will **** for
us, we hope, enough. In peace,
we shall piecemeal them, and serve
them meals made of toxins and tallow.
For their labor, we shall pay them
slave wages;  and all that we give,
we shall take back, and more, by
monumental scandals that subside
like day's sun at eventide. We shall
be clever, as ever, circumspect and
surreptitious at all times. We shall
keep them deluded with the verisimilitude
of hope, but undermine always its
being. We shall infuse their lives
with fear and hate, playing one
race against another, one religion
against a brother's. Disaffection is
our key;  but we must modulate our
efforts deftly, so the poor remain
frightened and angered, but always
blind and deaf and divided. And if,
perchance, one foments, we shall
seize the moment and drop his head
into his hands, even as he speaks.
This internecine brew we pour, there-
fore, into the poor to keep them drunk
enmity and incapacitation. Ah,
eternal anticipation! Bottoms up,
old chaps! We, those who rule,
shall have them always in our laps.
We are, as it were, their salvation.

Tod Howard Hawks