What I saw

What I saw with my eyes

Were the people bleeding dignity

Like the open veins of Latin America

There are men without souls bleeding willingly, gambling and selling it off enthusiastically

Madness in their hearts

And the others who suffer

Are bleeding unwillingly

It is taken away every day 

Like nonconsensual blood donors

If not from robbery then from breathing the smog air

From one interaction after another

From an uncaring stranger, a buyer, a patron

My friend, my human brother, produces his art with the humility of an ascetic. An office man with a black umbrella walks over haughtily, asking him for a piece of free string. 

Gesturing ‘please’ with his hands

With an expectant and greedy smile that he won’t be denied

Who dares to demand generosity from someone who owns so much less?

I think about the price of that piece of string, less than what can be bought with the smallest denomination of currency 

It must have been produced somewhere

I remember the bribri taking a piece of fibre from a tree, and refining it in his hands over and over until it turned into a braided bracelet

The same length of string, but a black nylon polyester mix

somehow worth nothing

Not by the value of time or effort

But by sheer violence

Men like him produce dignity for the rest of us

When we collapse and become lazy and corrupted inside, we take secretly and freely from the men put into place as our slaves by invisible violence 

So that we can pretend to be kings for another day

In this imbalanced machinery that we call society