Like Gaza, the acts of genocide are hidden beneath the manufactured reality we are presented with, but you don't need to kill with guns and bombs when you can starve people out, deny them medicine, and make their very existence illegal. The methods differ, but the systematic elimination remains the same—dressed up as urban planning, healthcare policy, and law and order.
Genocide Of The Poor
They draw the lines like battle
plans in red ink on city maps,
mark neighborhoods for
"renewal" and "development,"
while sirens wail through streets
that once held families
now scattered like autumn leaves
before bulldozers.
The medicine costs more than rent,
the rent costs more than wages,
the wages buy less than silence
from those who make the rules,
and food cost prayers and tears,
no money to buy it.
Buses roll through midnight
streets
carrying the displaced to nowhere—
one-way tickets to forgotten
places
where the forgotten go to
disappear.
Unmarked vans and unmarked people
appear and disappear in the
streets,
Tallying their kills—
the ones they didn’t have to buy a
bullet for,
or make an effort to relocate,
because they died on their own,
No medicine for the ill,
no doctors for the sick,
no food for the hungry,
no shelter over their head,
to shield them from death’s scythe.
But the wheel keeps grinding,
and yesterday's planners become
tomorrow's planned,
yesterday's deciders become
tomorrow's decided upon,
as the hungry machine demands
fresh fuel.
The middle class discovers
their bootstraps have been cut,
their savings evaporated
in the same heat that consumed the
others.
Now they stand in the same lines,
hold the same cardboard signs,
learn the same bitter lessons:
that the bottom has many floors.
The wheel keeps grinding,
grinding down,
grinding through
every layer of society
until only the grinders remain,
feeding each other
to their own machine.
And still it turns,
this engine of elimination,
creating what it destroys,
destroying what it creates,
an ouroboros of inequality
eating its own tail
in an endless feast
of systematic starvation.
The last ones left
will draw new lines,
mark new maps,
find new others
to feed the grinding wheel
that grinds forever
in the heart
of empire.
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