Dedicated to the Los Angeles Workers’ Center

 
seven weeks

my father will receive a seven weeks
severance package for seven years of leg
problems, sleep and anxiety complications
spinal disc compression, a slowly growing
addiction to easily prescribed narcotics, the
fear of the factory closing down at the end
of the year, sending away all jobs to mexico
now fully realized – dreams of a union now
a distant memory, a haunting regret

tuition costs are set to increase overseas in
england and thousands of students march
some setting fires, occupying buildings, sit-ins
damaging society’s private fruit: the ancient
system of value and oppression: the justification
for police repression: the validation of
incarceration, expulsion, reprisal, societal
excommunication and exile for damaging
 
property

and in the states, tuition costs increase
8 to 15% for universities in california
dozens and hundreds protest but the vast
majority are quiet, their silence expanding
like an inhaling chest, not because of apathy
rather because of a systematic, contradictory
disease that has been plaguing us for
generations, an anti-education onslaught that
has left most students dulled with pain
indebted to the loans of financial institutions
and its finance capital: a modern educational
indentured servitude, dejected and exhausted
yet with fists clenched tight, knuckles white
and anger! – and anger

that goes nowhere

and my brothers that contemplate a higher
education are painted a better, more
affordable picture of joining the military
that mobile factory for a stretching empire
where its components are its consumables
 
as the ghosts from the streets of
los angeles and oakland crowd in front
of the workers’ center: hungarian immigrants
oscar grant, manuel jaminez, ruben salazar,
james davis, all circling a cigarette among
themselves, their eyes fixated on the red
house, peeking in through the windows
waiting, hoping and demanding that we
continue this torturous process of fighting, of
struggling, breathing without blinking, crying
without losing composure, compromising
without conceding
 
as protests vacillate from mass riots to
candle-lit vigils, as the tide of anger grows
then recedes then again grows, hardening and
maturing into revolutionary resolve, as the
individual wanes and dissolves into something
abstract, enhanced and

collective

it is a myth, a lie, when they say that our
bodies are filled with blood

we are made up of fire in its liquefied state
a red fire that has been keeping us alive from
the beginning, circulating throughout our
bodies; and when there’s injustice, our
reaction of painful squirming is only the fire
breaking the skin trying to get out

our bodies know nothing else other than the
red burns of struggle, of bubbling, boiling hot
revolution