Our Past: Rupturia
Chapter 2: The Banished Me Crossing the Sea
We Once Were One: Half of the Sum/Short of the Whole
Grief can be the garden of compassion.
If you keep your heart open through everything,
your pain can become your greatest ally
in your life’ search for love and wisdom.
–Rumi. 1207-1273.
When I protested,
the establishment retaliated
‘n judged me the problem,
condemned my best qualities
‘n held them against me;
denied life-care services, I began to die.
The more I pled,
I was deemed seditious ‘n unworthy;
my rights were revoked.
Trauma by injustice
fractured my heart
‘n tore time apart.
I choked in wordless agony
as my self was desecrated,
oppressed ‘n mauled.
They thereby perpetuated
their cult of cruelty and savagery,
sustaining themselves on my misery.
Cruelty just kept on taking
while the state perpetrators
immune to accountability
licked their fingers
as they gorged on my flesh
and devoured my humanity.
The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.
–Kurt Cobain. 1967-1994.
There may be times when we are powerless
to prevent injustice,
but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
–Elie Wiesel. 1928-2016.
Take chances, make mistakes. That’s how you grow.
Pain nourishes your courage.
You have to fail in order to practice being brave.
–Mary Tyler Moore. 1936-2017.
It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die,
than to find those who are willing
to endure pain with patience.
–Julius Caesar. 44-49BC
Find a place inside where there’s joy,
and the joy will burn out the pain.
–Joseph Campbell. 1904-1987.
Whoever is spared personal pain must feel himself
called to help in diminishing the pain of others.
We must all carry our share of the misery
which lies upon the world.
—Albert Schweitzer. 1875-1975.
Without Justice,
my tide of need rose
‘n worries swelled;
pain ebbed ‘n flowed.
I defended myself,
I fought to survive,
but I was not strong enough to defend justice.
I cannot remember what happened
to the Lady of Justice–it is too painful.
But I know who or what replaced her.
Alienation, bullying, pain ‘n terror
had achieved its goal:
It beat individuality
‘n sovereignty right out of me,
‘n smeared my unique signature.
Their loucheness left me nameless,
with the ultimate goal
of destroying our unity.
For what starts within,
inevitably extends without.
Shucked, husked ‘n scrubbed
by an elusive, exclusive, fake, ‘We,’
who tossed me like a skinned hide
on a pile of pelts of undesirables ‘n deplorables,
bundled for deportation by the voyageurs of depravity.
I assess the power of a will by how
much resistance, pain, torture it endures
and knows how to turn to its advantage.
–Friedrich Nietzche. 1844-1900.
Death is the king of this world: ‘It is his park
where he breeds life to feed him.
Cries of pain are music for his banquet.
–George Elliot. 1819-1880.
There is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we are brave enough to be it.
–Amanda Gorman. Born 1998.
Power concedes nothing without demand.
It never did, and it never will.
–Federick Douglas. 1818-1895.
It is the first responsibility of every citizen
to question authority.
–Benjamin Franklin. 1706-1790.
Banished
My best traits that made me, ‘Me,’
suddenly disqualified me
from protection under, ‘We.’
Sentenced–Excoriated–by
the new Combative Courts of Conformity
for speaking out against their lies and deceptions
‘n capitalization ‘n merciless marketing of the human cell,
at any cost.
I was desperate to regain what I had lost
but what little remained of me
continued to crumble ‘n decay.
reducing my capacity to fight
and to search for my lost vessel.
A beautiful thing never gives so much pain
as does failing to hear and see it.
–Michelangelo. 1475-1564.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
–Inscription on the Statute of Liberty, perched on the, ‘Island of Tears.”
The destination of the deportation is annihilation.
–Talaat Pasha, The Worst Criminal of WWI
And soon, too soon, we part with pain,
To sail o’er silent seas again.
–Thomas Moore. 1779-1852.
Arms ‘n legs chained ‘n shackled.
Deported on an automated barge,
over rough seas to a distant island.
For days, weeks,
I sailed, rocked, puked, turned ‘n tossed;
cast amidst the strewn debris of loss;
sky darkened as light disappeared;
no day, only night remained.
Hence, there was no way
to measure my stay;
attorned ‘n dazed
endless darkness,
wayward sea.
Pain–Linear:
The attacks–harassment, oppression,
threat of ‘n actual violence
–pack the power
to banish the survivor
from life, history ‘n time.
Hurting, sucked backward
into the suffocating withdrawal
induced by the vacuum of pain.
Hurtling into space, as we shrink
along the lines of its vanishing point,
spinning ceaselessly in diminishing perspective.
For we are born in other’s pain
and perish in our own.
–Francis Thompson. 1859-1907.
There is a pain–so utter-It swallows substance up–
Then covers the Abyss with Trance–
So memory can step
Around–across–upon it–
As one within the Swoon–
Goes safely–where an open eye–
Would drop Him–Bone by Bone.
–Emily Dickinson Gorman. 1830-1886.
And a woman had spoke, Tell us about Pain.
And he said,
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses
your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its
heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the
daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem
less wonderous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart,
even as you have always accepted the seasons that
pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the
winters of your grief.
Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within
you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy
in silence and tranquility:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by
the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has
been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has
moistened with His own sacred tears.
Kahlil Gibran. 1883-1931.
Pain–Cyclical:
Or, in this devastating spiral,
we are sucked up into the Gravitron.
Survivor and aggressor on opposite sides,
pressed against its brim; fluttering;
accelerating nowhere, fast;
our necks strained, our arms pinned
by the whirlwind of pain, anger and fear.
Unable to reach out, touch, embrace,
stuck in the inhumane, either spinning up,
infinitely away from everyone we love,
or, down, toward its dense,
oxygen-deprived vortex.
When the floor drops
from beneath our feet,
our dehydrated remains remain pinned;
immune to gravity, we hang.
Suspended in our unsought destination
in the realm of the malformed,
gripped by its invincibility,
and its invisible web,
wrapped in cellophane,
in the ceaselessly spinning
centrifuge of lifelessness.
Either horror, either trajectory,
we are arrested in the alienation
of Adversarial Americanism.
I was jolted back;
the boat bumped hard against a sandbar.
Off-boarded in chin-deep waters.
I realized I had crossed
a dark sea of pitch-black tar.
Warm, inviting but deadly.
Instinctually, I waded
toward shallower waters,
the waves pounded on my back
‘n ushered me along in uncertainty.
I stood,
dripping on shore,
in the soup of sorrow,
as the slugs of tar slid off me
then wiggled back to the sea of misery.
To be nobody but–yourself–
in a world which is doing its best, night and day,
to make you everybody else–
means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight
and never stop fighting
–E.E. Cummings. 1894-1962.
If you are neutral in situations of injustice,
you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
–Desmond Tutu. 1931-2021.
Never be afraid to raise your voice for
honesty and truth and compassion against
injustice and lying and greed.
–William Faulker. 1897-1962.