Better Make Sure You Win
Better make sure you win,
All the wars that you claim.
For the fighting is step one
In securing your fame.
You better perform on point, play the victim-less game,
We’re the ones now underfire! They’re provoking our pain!
They’re provoking the war; they’re resisting to change!
They’re the ones who force the bullet wounds, reject the exchange.
You better wipe them from existence, yes, good,
Make them the villain.
Put a gun into a baby’s hands
they’re no longer civilian.
Bury them in lists and memos, files and tweets,
So that every single casualty turns into dull bleats.
You better make sure that your propaganda’s louder than the screams
Make your patriotic tendencies apart of their dreams. You better
defame the activist and murder the journalist
And bleach all the testaments of histories archivists.
You better
pacify the people with a pressing concern,
Where’s the fact in so much content
Howl they ever decern
The truth from opinion
The light from the dark?
You better work to spin the story,
Better smother the spark.
Smother the hope,
Suppress all contradicting your lies.
Make it a sin
Become the Father and the Son in their eyes.
You better deaden your citizens to look on from genocide,
To look on with pity but swallow your empty lies.
Make them the voice of your philosophy,
They are the future the ones who will see.
Treat them like children, bring them into your warm embrace.
Treat them like children, prioritize the purer race.
And if they faulter?
Treat them like the children that they are,
So young and unlearned.
So far below the bar.
You better make sure that you listen to the words that make you hurt,
Because in your echo chamber are the words that just convert.
You better make sure that your narrative is quick to the keep,
Or the voices that you silenced will
devoured the weak.
Devour the weak, light a pyre full of your deceptions.
Put you on trial,
Broadcast all your blackened confessions. And in that moment
revolution reins in great terror,
Trading one oppressive practice for another in error.
But it won’t matter
for your head
will roll in the streets.
They’ll drink your blood, chew your eyes, like the sweetest of treats.
So, I’ll remind you,
in warning,
before you begin.
You better silence all those voices,
Better make sure you win.
C. A. P. Pulotu (she/her) is a Polynesian writer fueled by a passionate love for storytelling. A recipient of the 50th Anniversary Scholarship at the College of Southern Nevada, Pulotu graduated with an Associate of Arts in Creative Writing. Currently a senior at Nevada State University, she is pursuing an English degree with a focus on Creative Writing – Poetry. She serves as an editor for NSU’s literary magazine 300 Days of Sun.
The Albion Review 