The Coming Darkness

So you have ascended Nero back into the palace.

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Are you happy?

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Are you satisfied at how you contorted yourself

to justify the coming darkness you’ve unleashed?

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Have you given thought to his own promise

of dictatorship from the first moments,

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or did you think that was just rhetoric,

ill-chosen language, childish blowhard phrases?

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When will you learn that when a bully tells you

who he is, you should believe him the first time?

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Even now you scoff at these words, so let me

tear away the veil before your eyes.

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It will start with the immigrants, the ones who

pick your vegetables, butcher your meat,

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the ones who build your homes and pave your roads,

who clean your offices at night, watch your children,

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cook your meals, keep your homes clean and tidy.

Rounded up like cattle, they will be pounced upon in raids at

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their homes, their workplaces, their churches.

Citizen children pulled out of their schools,

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shipped off to the dusty borderlands to live in tent cities

where no cameras are allowed, no legal recourse entertained.

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Black holes of despair, just over the horizon,

where no human rights are respected, until the buses

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come to take them away, disappearing into nothingness.

Another country’s problem now.

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You think it stops there?

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Your gay uncle is on the list, your lesbian sister close behind.

Would you stand by and watch their rights abridged,

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marriages annulled, parental rights ripped away as

liberty becomes a shell of itself and the notion of

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“all created equal” becomes a line from Animal Farm?

What will you do when they aim at your sisters,

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your daughters, with legislation requiring two forms

of ID to vote, and “they better both match or you get scratched

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and why didn’t you take your husband’s name when you got married?

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Why didn’t you ever get married at all?”

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You brought the criminal Nero back from the dead,

but this time there is no Seneca to guide him.

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And what will you do, my beloved friends,

when they come for me and mine, the truth tellers,

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the artists, the muralists, the songwriters, the playwrights?

Will you pull me aside and whisper for me to be quiet,

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for my own sake? You know me better than that.

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Perhaps it will hit home when a woman you love

is denied the medical care she needs, and you

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watch her slip away in agony, because some old men

somewhere think they know better.

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You longed for the halcyon days where everyone knew their place,

with yours secure at the top of The Order of Things,

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refusing the reality that the only constant is change. In so doing,

you hand your Nero his fiddle,

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his kindling,

his matches.

Help me stop the Republic's pitiless burning,

before it’s too late.