Dissent. Dissent. Dissent.

Too much?

For the sake of compliance, let’s keep this poetic.

Which is not to say that poetry is compliance. For the sake of safety, let’s keep this ambiguous, which is to say, up to interpretation, because fear is too big a motivator when one’s livelihood depends on the oppressor.

Have I gone too far already?

I won’t pretend I’m someone important. I’m not, and I have not, and never will be, nor do I wish to be. But there are things I can say and things I cannot. Please understand this ambiguity. Call me a coward, if you must, because I want to say everything that makes me angry, and I want to say everything that makes me sad, but I know, given my limited skillset, there is one thing I can do, and I am doing it.

Write.

Listen: Do you understand yet? From Time Magazine.

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin

Too much?

Not enough.

Joseph Chan from Unsplash; from the protests in Hong Kong in 2019.

I cannot say much for fear of recrimination. Such a silly thing, isn’t it? Dissent, dissent, dissent. Remember to breathe. Turn off your phone. Turn it back on. Listen but don’t speak. Listen. Look. Reflect. Am I a threat or a mirror? How ugly they must feel.

I feel it in the way they ask us to report on each other, how the simple love we have for culture and equity and diversity has become a loathing, a sneaking thumbtack in the ribcage, torn and torn and torn until we are laid bare for birds of carrion, our bodies born of nothing, our lives stripped to bone.

I feel it in my gagged silence, in the way I must shield my words out of love and out of fear, so much so that I will peel away my sheltered skin and present my nakedness in pretty words and damning pictures.

It’s too much.

Not enough.

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

—Martin Niemöller

Let’s end on something I wrote, something unrelated, but it all relates, because words tell truths and they tell lies, and they remember, words always remember. Where do we live now, besides a place with one foot in ignorance and the other in misery?

The god of the moon shifted. Their body became half-obscured and then a quarter. Soon, they existed only in shadow. Soon, everyone forgot they existed at all.

The god of trees decided they’d seen enough, but when they tried to stand, they found themself rooted to the floor.

“A sickening creature,” they whispered.

“A pitiful creature strapped

to skin. As such, silence stands

true. Do not speak. I will not

answer.”

No one spoke. Not even the god of spirals, who, in their infinite wisdom and all-seeing black hole of an eye, could stomach the sight in front of them.

Such beautiful misery. Look at the sky-scraping mountains. Look at the children laughing. Look at the women hanging their laundry, at the men chewing on their cigarettes, at the temples swimming in the rain, at the rivers choked with cremated ash.

Look. Don’t look. Look.

Don’t look. Look. Don’t look.

Look. Don’t look. Look.

For fuck’s sake, look. Please. Please look.

—Melissa Perri Smith, ABOAW