Ali Alizadeh
We
The political struggle is also the struggle for the appropriation
of words.
Jacques Rancière
We are decent. We love our country
and our liberty. We earn a living
off the profits of thingifying nature
for rich trading partners who pay us
with the blood of terrorised workers. We hear
the chitchat between the puppets
of capital (Prime Minister & Opp. Leader)
and give our consent to their triviality
via free and fair elections. We dream
of feeling happiness as psyches rejoice
at buying iPads and designer socks, a life
finally expiating its futility
with a 2% pay rise. We purr
when coddled in the arms of a community
founded on culture and religion, hiding
hatred behind the mask of heritage. We
are really as pathetic as that? I wake
up early (or surrender to my insomnia)
to daydream about another we: the people
flummoxed by so much fantasy, struggle
and wander toward the truth of an Event
after the idea of equality, for a humanity
that won’t be conditioned by a pronoun
when we are the name of the immeasurable
power to rupture the reality of the world
and instigate new worlds, the traces of eternity.
