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they were consuming poison, no matter how savory the package.
the megaphone, a vintage piece of slick plastic that felt like power in his hands.
Her eyes held a knowing brown simmer,
Some truly didn’t think about the fact that men and women were being murdered every day by the same government their children pledged allegiance to at school.
he’d found friends who felt what he felt, and then, because they knew they needed to do something, they’d become activists. Or they’d tried. Usually they’d partied and studied and lived young, foolish lives. But when they’d had time, they’d demonstrated and held meetings.
He was born and lived and loved and hated. We do not excuse him or the chaos and pain he thrust into the world, but because we see and know that what he did in a moment of confusion and rage was an assault on all that is sacred, we must remember and see that what we’ve done to him in retribution has promised him that he was right. Retribution of the same kind promises he was not wrong but rather that he was small. To punish this way is to water a seed. His name was Barry Harris. His name was Barry Harris. We’ve sacrificed him to feed our fear. To pamper our sloth.
It was all death, slow or fast. Painful or sudden. Nothing more. The culture of Chain-Gang was death.
watching a lamb get slaughtered was not good sporting.
It was hard to forget the things that hurt you. You didn’t often forget the shape of your cage.
A thin branch in a silent wind song.
In here your own voice is a kind of wish. A shooting star. You don’t waste it on nothing.
I’m in a bed that’s soft, so I’m singing. I’m in a bed. I’m eating food I can taste, food with color on it, so I’m singing.
It’s hard and soft at the same damn time, my voice is, like a tree with tender meat under bark.
I was enslaved. Just ’cause you enslaved don’t make you a slave. You can’t ever be that.
I see the guillotine in him.
A bored executioner. A white shirt and black tie. His face seems squeezed of life.
they take pain and make it something brand-new every chance. They got every flavor and they keep making more.
They paint the walls with words. They build walls with their words.
She hated what she was, but she loved what she could do.
Lord, you know my heart in all things, he prayed. I know I been prone to fuck shit and I’m not saying I didn’t do things to deserve punishment, but you know my heart, Lord, and I pray you give me a shred of your grace through this trial before me.
Was she a killer or had the world made her one?
a plague that ruined the lives of men and all they touched: He needed to be seen as strong, menacing, powerful. He struggled against it constantly.
Fate spins us all.
Somehow the promise and potential of carnage made you crane your neck, and if the strain resulted in some bloody prize, you’d have what? A story to tell. Trauma for yourself.
the strange surge of witness. The electric awareness of the stakes of life.
many politicians had already appeared before holostreams to implore nonviolence. An absurd thing for the murderous state to plead for, but, as always, the massive violence of the state was “justice,” was “law and order,” and resistance to perpetual violence was an act of terror. It would have been funny if there weren’t so much blood everywhere.
Many of these private facilities had government contracts that were determined by the number of inmates incarcerated—more prisoners, bigger contracts.
America has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. We cling to the archaic and destructive practice of using death as a penalty for crime, when most countries have abolished the death penalty altogether. But rather than follow the lead of the rest of the world, we’ve gone in the exact opposite direction. Under the guise of economic stimulus and punitive prevention, we’ve allowed the state to administer public executions as entertainment. We’ve lost our way,
he got something to prove to everybody ’cause he got something to prove to himself.
He carries a heavy flail, a spiked ball on a chain. Heavy flail he named Heavy Flail.
I thought of how the world can be anything and how sad it is that it’s this.
Death the currency of everything if you let it. And they let it.
He who has not been messed up has not been.
In a sick world, healthy is strange.
What she’d learned was that life, any life, was death and rebirth, death and rebirth. Everything always changed.
Socialization has an inertia.
she was exhausted by the brutality that was so ubiquitous in American culture.
“I mean that all those issues that you’re talking about are symptoms of our current system. Rampant poverty, a lack of resources for people suffering from addiction and mental health issues—those are difficult problems, but ones that can be addressed. But they aren’t. Because criminalization dehumanizes individuals and implicates them rather than a society that abandons them in times of need.”
a curator of truth herself. She staged it, gave it light, made it available to herself when needed, and sometimes shelved it altogether. Stashed it hard into the recesses of her mind. But there was no destroying what was true. Still she curated,
As usual, the police had equipment that suggested war and not cotton-candy stands. Equipment that would only make sense if they were expecting other similarly armed police officers suddenly to revolt and turn against them.
“Okay, enough.” The officer made his voice big to try to remind them that he was in charge, though his having to try made it feel exactly the opposite. Under the scrutiny of the protestors, who were still flooding the surrounding area, the officers seemed keen on proving they were good men, that they weren’t the enemy, and yet there could be no enemy but them. They were the ones with guns.
There is a space in time when violence tears through from imagined to physical—and if that physical is met with more physical, then the violence can become both the vehicle and driver for all that comes after, and what has escaped can be incredibly difficult to contain.
the violence grew and spread. The truest human virus multiplied through the masses. The violence took control.
“You forgive yourself, you’re High Freed. That’s what I want for y’all. Forgive yourself, then you can start working on everybody else.
The police begged again for peace as they rolled their tanks forward.
you spending your time going back to hate your own self. It’s a fool’s errand.
you can curse yourself to the moon and back and what will it have you feeling like? But try to look at yourself and say ‘I love you’ and see what happens.”
He prayed for all those suits who had no idea what they were a part of and all those who understood it perfectly.
He thanked God for showing him his life had not been for nothing. He did not know what it was for, but he knew it was not for nothing.
If it weren’t real it would have been beautiful.
