“Tell ‘em all to stand up! Tell ‘em! Tell ‘em!”

As if it will do any good.
Let someone else stand up.
Someone else, surely, will take a stand
against the ills of this world.

I am too busy being an artist,
too busy being a worker bee
in the institutions of finance
making money to be an artist.

Too busy making money to just be.
Too busy to take a stand.

“Sit down!” they might say to me
when I insist upon justice.

“Sit down!” they’ll shout, when I point
my truth, like an arrow through
the nothing of their wicked souls.

“Sit down!” their press will write, when I speak
of their debauchery and sin. These flagrant
men whose black vision rules our world.

And then, they laugh, these men whose
withered dicks once saw a child’s uterus
in the darkness of her tiny body.

They laugh. “She’s just…
getting it out of her system.”

“Yes, who believes the matron?”

“Haha! Who believes the witch
walking between the light and the dark?”

“Tell ‘em to stand up!” shout the dead, “Tell ‘em!
Tell ‘em!” in time eternal.

I already did.

But truth is not a Goebbels theme… I’m sorry…

“Ah, yes,” they chime. “Goebbels.”
“We gobbled him up yesterday”
“In Nazi pie, with sherry wine.”

“We shat him into brine today”
“He grows again and again,”
“To our dismay.”

Again and again,
a bored dessert he became,
for goblins and trolls.

“Maybe they’ll stand up tomorrow.”

Credit: the first line is from the one-act play “Bury the Dead” by Irwin Shaw