POEM 74: CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE


Welcome to Dumbland
Here, we bite our tongues
And chew on words
Swallow them up
So they don't spill out.
The taste of prejudice
Is in our mouth
So we chew silence
And swallow the words we could've spoken.
"Talk is cheap" they say
But we cannot afford to call it spade
The hands that shovel discord and distrust down the dry throats
Of hedged bridges.
We are sentenced to silence,
Haunted by fear,
Hunted by herds,
Hewed down and slowly murdered by things we didn't say. 
Buried in unmarked graves
Under a cloud of weeping night stars
That morph into a smiling sun
In the wake of dawn.