The Ledgers Will Rot

Poetry

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The Ledgers Will Rot

The papers pile, damp as mildew, brittle as bone,
spreading across desks and kitchen tables,
the weight of them flattening the air.
Each word must be sifted through gauze,
each silence is counted, tallied like coins.

The stories arrive—
a knife in a park,
blood in the kitchen sink,
children struck in daylight—
and those who mourn are told their grief is selfish,
commanded to kneel before graves with no bodies,
to chant a genocide rehearsed on paper,
while their own wounds are dismissed as inconvenient,
unfit for remembrance.

Once, a brother to the south bartered
steel for grain, timber for timber.
Now he taxes marrow,
leans with ledgers instead of hands,
while clerks in glass towers nod,
and call it progress, order, necessity.

The streets are gardens of eyes.
Lampposts sprout them.
Traffic lights blink their lids.
The wires hum with an endless listening.
Cameras flower where blossoms should grow,
black irises staring into bedrooms,
hallways, kitchens.
The mirror no longer holds the self—
only the watcher’s blurred face,
teeth clicking like shears, recording.

The body grows porous under such watching:
skin ceded to the archive,
gestures stolen before they finish,
thoughts trembling, half-born,
already transcribed.

Yet some remain—
few, stubborn as frost welded to stone.
They breathe an older air,
coal smoke and pine lodged still in the lungs.
They lift lanterns into the dark,
their hope carved from hunger,
their faith flickering against glass walls,
reminding the land it has not been wholly forsaken.

Bless them—
keepers of soil beneath the asphalt,
guardians of rivers beneath the wires,
those who refuse false ghosts,
who lift their eyes though watched,
and lift them anyway.

What they guard is small,
but it endures—
a seed lodged in ash,
a syllable not yet erased.
When the ledgers rot,
when the wires rust,
it will speak again.

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