Beyond the Mangled Barbed Wire

Will be back soon….to give voice to their visions and narrative. Together we can make sound for those who are often muted in this world.

CAPTIVE

Man constructs the barbed wire,
And the barbed wire forms the man
Clinging to hot metal; grazing shoulders; between protruding spikes
Wistful, fatigued from de facto hallucinations
Thirsting for liquid donations
And getting rations of raised suspicions and murmurs instead
Equipped only with munitions of his ethnic claim
And remembrances of his human shield offerings
All must return home – yet home gives itself to no one.

But the defenders force step it in reverse,
Stumbling past the wire wall
Thwarted by the internment of their own minds,
Held in custody by habitual unrest
And banished by tranquilized soldiers and guardsmen
We all retreat to the picket fences of home
And dive head first into that haze of complacency

And as we sit there, suspended in dispassionate maintenance,
The war crimes of the mind suddenly give way,
To the armed insurgents attacking at you.
But you forward march anyway – in the hope of the save
Because you know their sunken eyes have at last arrested you,
Through a mass of twisted separatism
As they exhale a breath of anguish
All over your crooked prosperity

And so you blow the cycle of protests wrestling inside
And take the assault of the opposition,
Keeping your fists in check all the while –
Storing all that fury for the groundwork
And you go; you give way to all that detains you
Knowing that you are entangled in their captivity,
And that they remain caught up in yours.

Sonali Fiske