POLITICAL Poem: Immolation (Revolutionary Fire), by Alexander Dvorshock

Flashing eruptions
burn into my mind’s
eye

inescapable
empathy,
fear,

disturbed visions
of collective fates
seen before,
and again.

Immolation.

Immolation:

Underground,
in the forests,
in the desert, too.

In between fires,
seasons, court sentences
and hidden files, breaks
for monied-money
and brutal policy for Us,

clever slavers craft
more chains to tie
down wider lies: nets
and snares, new crimes
for you and I.
They push

us until we have
no homes left to flee,
no common ground
to lie down,
to piece back together
our hearts
or our minds
our ruined bodies

(corporate realty snatched
it all up for dormitory
look-a-likes; spaces filled
with indignant smiles on tired
wage-slaves tending lingering
chain-stores in the new plazas
off new lanes on the highways

we ourselves
did not arrange,
did not build,
did not permit.

We did not ask,

for our cluttered lives
to serve sick entrepreneurial
minds forever in need
of endless abundance,

infinitely higher
production,
consumption,
generation,

which must come
from somewhere
We own).

Now,

American hearts
Ache and beat
harshly for too long,
burning too hot.
Acid rising.

People rising.
Peace forgotten
under decades’

of hunger,
disaster,
defining the line
between apocalypse
and present.

Between the burning
red meridians:

Immolation
of the self.

Immolation
of the mind.

Immolation
of the soul

in revolutionary
fire.