I sit here speechless with my mouth agape,
exercising only my brain and wrists;
sore at the truth
because power takes vacations.
Literally,
While the people stay working
and waiting.1
The nation’s on pause,
and workers go unpaid.
Families stand in line for food
that may not ever come.
Programs cut.1
Dreams delayed.
The tables are emptier
then their false promises
And us?
We’re stuck in the middle,
between choosing sides
that both forgot the people.
Between red and blue seas,
there’s only grey water,
murky, deep, pulling us under.
And us, we’re here,
somewhere in the middle,
learning to live between contradictions,
trying to find language
in a world that only speaks in profit.
I say I’m anti-capitalist,
but I’m still shopping.
Still breathing in plastic air,
still feeding my data to billionaires.2
How do you fight the system
when the system is your oxygen?
I can volunteer,
work for nonprofits, NGOs,
help a family see change,
see progress,
but even these organizations
profit off the existence of the problem.
They need poverty to stay employed.
They create the very people
they claim to save.3
And that makes me sick.
And tired.
And still guilty.
I don’t know who I have to be.
All I do is critique.
I judge injustice,
and then I judge the ones
who fight injustice
for not doing it right.
I call out hypocrisy
until I drown in my own.
Is it better to build,
or to break?
Critique creates movement,4
but too much movement
feels like spinning.
I’m dizzy with awareness;
awake but unanchored;
alive but exhausted.
Everything that benefits me
comes at the expense of someone else.
Every breath feels borrowed
from a body buried
in someone else’s struggle.
Sometimes I wonder
if being “a good person”
is just another brand
like “self-care.”
like sustainability,
like activism.
What is good, then?
Who decides?
God?
Society?
Capital?
Or is “good” just a word
we trade to feel less guilty
for the comfort we keep?
Am I bitter,
or just tasting what truth really is?
Sour like yesterday’s stale coffee,
or maybe it’s the taste of knowledge
simmering for eighteen years or
learning about the shitstorm we live in,
feeling unsatisfied
with what I know to be true
and what I’ll never know at all.
Angry at the people who antagonize,
westernize, realize what they’re doing;
but who am I to judge
when I’ll never do quite enough?
Am I bitter,
or did I just find out
I’ve been feeding
the very systems I starve to change?
Am I bitter,
or did they just eat all the sweets,
leaving us only with the aftertaste
of nickel and paper,
while they unbutton their jeans
and call it freedom?
Am I bitter?
Or is it just the flavor
of my own contradictions:
of my shitty, target-brand coffee.
My parents raised me with wealth.
Wealth they grew and used to help,
to build,
to protect family.
And I know they mean well.
But that same wealth
was grown in a garden
fertilized by injustice:
mass incarceration,
genocide,
exploitation,5
and I’m supposed to call it success.
I say I’m anti-capitalist,
but I’m paying tuition.
I’m buying the lie
that this degree will free me.
I’m feeding the same machine
that’s starving the world.
We all are.
We are hypocrites by design.
We are consumers by necessity.
We are dreamers
trapped in debt.
How do I break a system
that built the floor I’m standing on?
How do I resist
when resistance has a barcode?
Maybe I’m not bitter.
Maybe I’m just awake.
Awareness has an aftertaste,
and I’ve learned to sip it slowly.
It burns,
but it means I’m still here:
learning,
failing,
unlearning again.
Maybe being awake
isn’t about happiness or despair or even acceptance,
maybe it’s just
refusing to fall back asleep.