Blame it on me

When I satirize your despotism

Of your bloodied hands

Or of your devious heart

Driving blade into throats

Choking conscience in stunted growth

Corrupting men’s hearts with untruths

Employing court poets to crown you

Why should that satire irk you?

Why should your stomach churn

If at all your leadership is unparalleled?

Why should my poems cloud your heart

If indeed they are a “work of a nihilist”?

If my poems are “acidic” and a recipe for “disorder”

Where is acidity in the strewn bodies of massacred victims?

Which disorder do I portend for dim lit eyes of famished souls?

If my poems are “dangerous” and “misplaced”

Pray, are the unmarked graves of your victims any better?

Or as misplaced as hopes hang on tree?

If my poems are “inflammatory” and “likely to stir ethnic tensions”

What will you say of cindered hearts and frothing frustrations?

What will you call the barren clouds defaced?

Blame it on me, then.

Blame me.

You have the platform: issue a declaration, press treason upon me,

Classify my poetry seditious, ban me, if all else fails send thugs to wipe me out

Then call it “random acts of robbers”

Blame it on me, then.

Blame me.

See, in the tunnels of my emotions

Lie a power bigger than what you wield;

It rings into the future, it is the past

When these emotions mix with the blood

Of your victims, they can scale wall of your lies

These are my soldiers, I send them with the barrel of my pen

Once writ, not even killing me reverses their power

Still, you can blame it on me

Blame me.

C) Lorot Salem 2011