(via Justin Rovillos Monson: “Institutional(ized) Political Poem, or Poem for Disputed Territories”)
My homie, full of brief fire, declares he’d help kill
and I say “Nah, free them people,” and he has ceased
to admit what I, too, cease to admit: in this cage
we don’t know how to talk about politics.
There ain’t no Kant here, no Augustine, or political
thought leader without Machiavellian teeth. We kill
the parts of us, or at least bury the bones, that ceased
to be useful in the jungle. Our tongues are in cages.
Our eyes are in cages. Our hearts, in cages.
Yet, there are no wars here now. Only prison politics
for my homie and I to profit from or dead
the smaller beefs until the gangs have ceased
the battle over disputed territories. War never stops;
it hibernates, even here in the joint—cage
governed by shadows, they are living the politics
of occupation, trying to avoid being killed.
Meanwhile, my homie and I count years as we feed
the beast of time we are lucky to have. Our bodies began,
long ago, and still, to be seen and classified as field
weapons in thisoccupied land of the free.
Copyright © 2025 by Justin Rovillos Monson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 20, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
