Puhon

Have you ever mourned for millions on the other side of a TV screen?

Has static ever felt like thorns coiling around your neck?

I seem to have forgotten my tapestry at home

She lays in wrinkles and with aged edges

White, red, yellow– the men in blue passed by my bliss

And how strange, they praised my ignorance

The fog had cleared as the thousands laid with fists clutching the cloth

I seem to have forgotten, those same four colors were my lifeline:

Headlines play as white noise to keep myself tethered

How can one adorned in clear silk and lace

with shining cuffs of starlit gold, be also damp in crimson?

“A shining iron fist, a knight for the people,” they said

Yet we were met knuckle to cheek and a modern day pietà in the streets

Am I tasting the metal or my own blood?

All I saw was white before the storm had raged

Fetal position with alloy in his cranium

Plastered across media and in pixels of dark grey

Someone dropped their champagne on the celebrity carpet

Yet has it always took on the shade of wine?

She drags the woven textile

Silken red resembling her mother’s ruby jewels

Does she follow in the same 3,000 Dior footsteps?

Velvet curtains, widely revealing her pearly whites

How gruesome that they shine brighter than our scarlet southeast

Whose children are tagged with malice as they stifle their dissent

Our aliases become armor, yet our words raise red flags

Past the banner we have nothing to cushion the bullet

I can no longer hang onto pastel ribbons

Yellow pages with neon headlines only litter our screens

1986 will not repeat itself for the new age

Their beaten track still cultivated thorns

Now new blood marches on the gravel

And I wonder, will it be this time you shoot?

With words for artillery and the tapestry at full mast

We press on, press forward no matter the silencing

Holding the line with blistered fingers