Someone else's dam has burst
Someone else's children are shooting
Someone else's war is escalating
Someone else's soup is burning
Someone else's misery is measureless
Someone else's eyes are sad
Someone else's words have fallen on deaf ears
Someone else's success has surpassed all expectations
Someone else's 's garden is going to waste
Someone else's business has folded
Someone else's path is straight and easy
Someone else's clothes are ill-fitting
Someone else's shoes are walking away
Someone else's neon sign is sputtering
Someone else's brother is a bigot
Someone else's karma has caught up with them
Someone else is saying How can this happen?
Someone else's dreams are nightmares
Someone else's country has committed war crimes
Someone else's country is returning stolen treasure
Someone else's smile is fake
Someone else's tears are fake
Someone else's bank account was hacked
Someone else's friends have moved to Ipswich
Someone else's sad eyes are Caucasian
Someone else's story is being told
Someone else's sad eyes tell a story
Someone else's son is trying to be a tree
Someone else is looking over their shoulder at us
Someone else is saying Why me?
Someone else is saying Why us?
......
Reflection:
"Someone else" in this poem is everyone, everyone but me (and the people in my life). I feel that the more I become aware of disasters in the world (earthquakes, missile strikes, floods, fires) that affect large groups of strangers, the more I realize that they aren't strangers to their own communities. And when I see a video of a man digging through the rubble of his home to find a missing child, he is no longer a stranger. So, in a lucid moment, each stranger is as real as me and has just as much right to be here, whether they are a bigot or the brother of a bigot, I still feel bad when they are victims or survivors of disaster. This is a poem of subtraction or elimination. It hacks the anonymity of humanity by taking random snapshots of humanity, a hopeless task, but theoretically, after I am done taking this random sampling of humanity, I will stop feeling quite so separate. At some point one would hope that the list of "someone else" ends with the lister looking into the mirror. If this poem is a hack, the last three lines are where the hack happens. The word "hack" has evolved through several permutations. Originally, hundreds of years ago, (OE) (ME) it meant to chop, hoe or hew. A few years ago hacking referred to the act of exploiting weaknesses in a computer system or network to gain access to data.These days hacking has been de-weaponized and elevated to a kind of super-power, as techno-savvy people are the ones we turn to when our devices crash. The new definition of hacking is something like, the ability to solve a paralyzing problem by decoding the problem and approaching it from inside out.
(Article changed on Sep 14, 2023 at 12:16 PM EDT)
(Article changed on Sep 14, 2023 at 12:19 PM EDT)
