Exclusions

 

Exclusions

Perhaps the story you tell yourself or anyone who will listen

is that the brown-skinned person 

you corralled in your paddy wagon

 is a criminal, a rapist, a drug dealing degenerate thug

You call them “immigrants” like a slur

or illegal as if an imaginary line in the dirt

bestows worth,

say they don’t deserve to be “here” 

that they are stealing “our” jobs, 

as if we were not all on borrowed time.

I wonder what poison you had to drink 

to close yourself to his humanity

to lock them out of your heart

I wonder who hurt you so badly

 that you find your strength in exacting violence

on the different, vulnerable, suffering.

What delusion lets you romp through 

the garden of eden 

proclaiming these subjects unworthy. 

Does your act of separation, 

your call to remove "them"

make you feel as powerful as you think?

Your closed heart, 

unmoved, calcified

breaks mine

And in that moment

 I am freed of the prison of hate 

I belong. 

I belong to all of it, the earth, the trees,

the flowers, the refuse, 

the nasty smoke garroting her lungs, 

my fellow humans and creatures –

 it is all me 

Nothing is excluded

and so I weep.