come alive (a poem)

Saturday, October 18, 2025

come alive A resurrection in breath, body, and bearing.

a voice,
a whisper from the rubble—
don’t let this go unnoticed.

beneath the collapse,
something still breathes.
the quiet insists:
we were here.

shadows, and the tellers,
watch this or that—
the world a stage,
lit by hunger,
written by the frightened,
performed by the lost.

and yet,
we keep acting—
out of love,
out of need,
out of light.

from caves, from dark, from depths—
from atrocity and power plays,
from fires and threat,
to work and tests,
to opportunity and respect.

we emerge, scarred but speaking.
we are the inheritance of endurance,
the pulse pulled through the ruins
into the right to rise again.

there was no reach, no impulse—
disassociate, fellow citizen.
the City of God missed you
on its third and final flyby.

come back to what is—
the beating heart, the drive, the impulse,
the want of a single cell,
the wild in our lungs
to make the blood work.

the flavor, the wet, the wiggle, the wonder,
the work of intimacy, the forgotten costs—
we burn for love.

come alive, awake.
no kings.
no slavery.
no loss.
i am breathing.

i am this warm engine—
the metabolizing intelligence,
a consciousness that costs to run.

i can project and scheme,
craft and lean,
dance and dream,
sweat and beam.

i can imagine a future
so much brighter
than the real we landed in—
decades later.

the time, the then and now—
the ability to scrub our memory
like drives,
like minority report glass interfaces—
seeing all, the omni-view,
and somehow
our heads don’t explode.

the heaving chest, the stagger, the stammer—
the little grasping fingers,
the curl and clasp,
the cord, the creation and way,
the curation and crutched motion—
forward.

even if it’s with a tail.
even if to sprout new lungs.
from water to air, to fire,
to pulse and scratch upon an active compute
fed by stars.

no worse for wear.
we have an entire universe.
who would care?

i can avenge;
i can open, or slam closed—
a citizen bearing dignity,
a human demanding decency.

the sovereignty of us—
we are not buried
in the wake of power-hungry frauds.

we are to come alive
for ourselves.

no longer ghosts in their engines,
no longer data in their empires.
we rise.
we return to pulse.
we claim the living right
to breathe,
to speak,
to be.