3:00 am

I stayed awake all night,

my mind pacing the dark

like an animal that knows

the fire is getting closer.

By morning

my thoughts were already screaming,

whole poems burning themselves

into the inside of my skull,

grief sourced, rage bright,

shards of truth too sharp to swallow.

What kind of world

learns to look away

from such horrific brutality,

and call it order?

It is murder.

What kind of mind

can see a child disappear

and feel nothing

but relief that it was not theirs…

yet.

I try to tell myself

they are not monsters.

I try to believe

no heart is born hollow.

So I name them what they feel like,

lost.

Drugged by fear.

Held hostage by lies

that whisper

you are special

as long as you obey.

A cult of shrinking souls

huddled around the warm glow

of their own imagined superiority,

terrified of the wild,

terrified of the poor,

terrified of the truth

that love is larger

than their walls.

If they cannot see it now,

the stolen lives,

the brutal hands,

the gaslit sky,

what catastrophe

will finally pry their eyes open?

That question

sits in my gut like a stone.

It hums.

It keeps me from sleeping.

It knows too much.

To you,

who are also awake at 3 a.m.,

staring into the ceiling

while the world fractures,

I see you.

I feel the tight coil

in your belly,

the electric grief

in your jaw,

the wild animal

of your anger

pacing back and forth.

We are not wrong for hurting.

We are not weak for weeping.

We are not crazy

for demanding equal access to basic

human rights.

Now is the time

to gather closer,

to pass water,

to hold hands,

to let each other collapse

and rise again.

Scream into pillows.

Cry into rivers.

Rest like your life depends on it

because it does.

And whatever you do,

whatever they bait you into,

do not become them.

Do not numb.

Do not harden.

Do not forget

how to feel another’s wound

as your own.

Our humanity

is the last unoccupied territory.

We must guard it

with everything we have left.

And we will.