Mayor Mensch declared all Civil Disobedience
Safe and even sacred, even in Sacramento
Before a city council hung like a rooster weathervane
Out to dry, in the balance.
"We will wait all night to hear everyone speak,"
He declared, sad he could not do more
For the olive trees and branches and cocktails
But the audience of one, the photojo in the free speech zone
Had left when pandemonium and arrests arrived
To such a carefully contrived chaos.
What is it but love everyone sought?
Fish-eyed, she had gazed for hours into Gaza,
Eyeless, thanked for bearing witness
To someone else's land and crime and truth
In the militarized zone of zealots
She once had been the queen of, telling the truth
To allow the seeing. Righteous of the word
She went beyond the pink sea's endless partings
In her rebellion of peace, the church key lady
Who lit a candle in the dark, for those who risk their lives
So she didn't have to, a fellow traveler
Photojo who had worn the fur.
But this resistance is all suffering
And darkness is the holding space.
Light is what she uses to speak
Thus walking in hell is walking in sunshine.
The banks close in on the border river, both are judgements
But the river is not, it is only the flow of light
Zero giving of fucks. To avoid too much photojo with the salt
She had to leave her ego at the checkpoint Charlie door.
Everyone has love as a weapon,
Everyone sees only light
Yet look how much seems aligned against it
To sell the illusion that it has no power.
The photojo looks for the clarity just out of range,
The detail that reveals it as a prop
On a manufactured stage on which
Our very real yearnings burn.
In the dream of a third opinion they give her
A wide berth, to be invisible enough to see,
But she renders no voice not her own,
That's the thing about the voiceless
She takes on, to fling upon the primal scream,
They make no sound.
She dreams of Lady Nada, how she sparkles in the pink spring
Like the light means something.
