words:
another
Another citizen was executed in the street.
i worry about loosing the reactionary sensation of empathy.
This dead person's name is no longer on the tip of mind and
unlike the long list of victims that catalyzed, in me,
an urge to march, or organize, or respond
(on behalf of Michael Brown, Philando Castile, George Floyd, Renée Good, Alex Peretti)
this public execution, recorded from my midwestern backyard
reveals apathy and impotence, unwelcome and damnable.
This long march responds to iterations of racial awakening
punctuated by murder and maim: Fred Hamptons and Rodney Kings.
We march for civil rights, labor, indigenous people, immigrants, colonized and victims
not only against racial supremacy
--the extra-legal punishment for social transgressions between castes
enforced by vigilantes like the Ku Klux Klan or Nazis--
but also possibility of being lynched, without trial, by public employees
armed by the military industrial complex, encouraged by the prison system.
Bystanders filming but not helping, taxpayers paying but not watching
to maintain the system that tortures you is Kafkaesque (by definition)
i am disturbed to feel people power is not enough,
that freedom to assemble siphons revolutionary pressure
and has traditionally been used as a tool for clandestine surveillance,
counter-affinity groups and agents provocateur.
i am distressed that i can't remember another name
and worry there is no more dialogue, democracy or learning left.
His name was Corey Ruiz. He was shot three times in the head by a Madison police officer.
The damning part of this one (in a macabre list alongside
"8 minutes and 46 seconds," "I'm not mad at you," and "four dead in Ohio")
is the procedural absurdity of panicking police, gunshots still ringing in their ears,
handcuffing a corpse whose face has just been blown off by a public service weapon.