the grief is billowing, and i don't know how we will ever recover

the grief is billowing

and i am screaming

and no one can hear me.

the grief is building and churning

i feed it my tears

nose running

breaths snagged between

inhales and exhales

the grief is rising

and they are screaming

and no one is listening.

everyday i wake up and my inner child is angrier than the day before. the villains she grew up reading about and watching on cyberchase, are all here. they are real, and people are more morally grey than she was lead to believe and she just might be more morally grey…

i feel sick to my stomach, my inability to hold both. i shame myself for the bits i can carry and like an overzealous, micromanaging supervisor ask myself “are you sure you can’t carry anymore?” i bring up the genocide in every conversation. it feels like the least i could do. it helps remind me that this isn’t normal, no matter how normal, it has become. i’m angry at the people who were supposed to protect and prevent, for not doing more. i’m angry at the people i meet,

who mention the suffering like we got rain today instead of the balmy sunshine we were promised. i’m angry at myself for not being willing to set myself on fire to try to get someone’s attention. and then i think of that man in the congo who did, in fact, set himself on fire, and no one blinked an eye.

i fell in love with poetry well before this moment but i remember sitting in my sixth grade english class with my teacher mrs. bailey introducing our next writing unit. she explained that before we even started on our project that we were going to spend some time brainstorming. she made it sound like the coolest thing on the planet. she talked about the importance of brainstorming, how she was going to help set the mood and vibe in the classroom and how we could do the same at home. we spent the next 5min brainstorming by ourselves, just our thoughts, our pen and our notebook. she called it a quick write, 5min where we would write down everything that came to mind. punctuation and capitalization didn’t matter. when we were done, we were to read what we wrote to ourselves and select 3-6 thoughts or lines that we liked best. then we partnered up, we shared our ideas and listened to ideas and then we brainstormed together. we talked about how we could develop our writing thoughts and how the other person could as well. and by the time we were done, the room was buzzing. the energy in the air was electric with possibility and joy and creativity.

the people don’t brainstorm anymore, they just ask ai. when we all know it’s not about the destination it’s about the journey. the people skip the journey and go straight to ai. and i feel like a black southern auntie who’s discovered that the kids are making thanksgiving mac n cheese out of a kraft box, but we’re losing the recipes to creativity. in fact not losing, but gleefully giving them away. i wonder what magic is being missed with every search. what creativity is being skipped. what self-discovery is being lost.

i’m craving accountability. tuh i’ve been craving accountability my whole life. from the first “do as i say, not as i do.” it’s about the small slips in integrity, it’s about rationalizing those slips to ourselves into killing our own communities. it’s about saying we care, but not acting like it. it’s about being gaslit and lied too and betrayed and being treated unfairly and the people acting unfairly getting away with it. it’s about watching people commit the most heinous acts imaginable and still getting to walk away. it’s about watching it and instead of getting angry or feeling hurt or doing anything about it so it doesn’t happen to you and yours, saying “yea that’s how the world is.” and in all of that mess it’s about losing our way to creating something that would be a vessel, a conduit for the grief and confusion we’re feeling. losing and giving away our innate ability and right to create, cheating ourselves out of our birthright. there used to be pride in struggling a little for your art. the stories of lost camera footage so you had to start over and what you made the second time might have been better than what you had the first go round. the stories of fried hard drives and expired paints, i miss those stories. i found myself in those stories, found encouragement and inspiration and *gestures wildly to everything* the grief, is billowing.

i’m not saying that before was perfect, i’m just saying that lately it feels like we’re all on the very fast track to losing our humanity and our creativity and i don’t know who we are or who we can be without either.

m.