I Am Not Asleep

I am not asleep.

I am not dreaming.

-

Everything is real. Stable.

The ground beneath us does not shift when we aren’t looking.

The sky is not on fire,

not choking on smoke and silent screams.

The world is not splitting at the seams.

-

The economy is a fortress, not a house of cards

stacked on the backs of the desperate.

Rent is affordable, wealth is fair,

and no one dies with their pockets turned inside out.

Corporations care, governments listen,

and trickledown works—

of course it does.

-

The climate is not unraveling.

The air is clean,

the waters rise exactly as they should.

Forests do not crumble into ash,

glaciers do not sink, sobbing, into the sea.

No one drowns in their own forgotten country.

This is fine. All of it.

-

And war?

There is no war.

Only distant thunder and headlines that fade too fast.

Borders never bleed,

bodies never vanish beneath flags.

The powerful don’t play their little games—

and even if they did,

surely we would know.

-

The artists are still painting,

the writers still writing.

No one has been told to do more for less.

No one has been wrung dry for content.

No one has had their voice,

their hands,

their worth

reduced to numbers on a screen.

-

The ones in charge wouldn’t let that happen.

They wouldn’t let the world become a machine—

not one that chews up the living

and spits out profit.

-

I am awake.

I am not sleeping.

I can’t be.

.