UNDER THE RUG
There it is again, UGH.
That’s the idiom we've become.
Wherein— even our context is extracted and abandoned.
But the context here is thus:
This. Our era: shoved Under the Rug.
Swept aside/put away/left behind/kept down.
Living in the land where the evils that kill us themselves never die. Instead, they industrialize.
I pray you're surviving/thriving through the crux of this, this most soul-boggling and mind-adling era.
An age of knowing so much. And doing… what?
Adam, having hoarded all the apples, CRISPRd the tree of knowledge into a shrub of factoids.
Just another data in an information agita. Just another day under the rug of a manipulation age.
Raging seas, raging youth, raging days, raging truth.
You know what I want to do?
I want to scream/dance.
I want to sunrise.
I want some semblance of sequence, but— where is any nuance?
Under the Rug.
It's giving flaming forest offsets.
It's giving still-legal/still-lethal cigarettes. It's giving carbon credits. It's giving complexity-shooed/stolen elections.
It's giving You Didn't Read The Terms and Conditions.
It's giving the country that inspired Hitler's systemic oppression vision. (America)
The awful and addictive interconnective tissue— TV? No, no. Too niche. Nowadays, all screens.
All dropped-cracked onyx portals to more war.
Wordle bought by the times to puzzle more.
Cookie trackers. Those real monsters.
With the potential to connect us. Bought to us by… us.
Also brought to us: Under the Rug.
Pulled out from under us. Like the fracked gas plugged into US.
Is that the right idiom? I'm not calling me an idiot. I’m ass-kin.
I know a tent is a rug. Attention's a rug. A cage is a rug.
Systems of a pressive knawing menace all based on a flawed premise.
All— Under the Rug.
Private Equity, Hedge Funds, Super PACs, Filibuster.
Always with another stupid name for it, evil.
I went to school to study it, but I’m still a fool.
Still paying those loans. I guess that there’s the proof.
I know nothing.
What good did it do but embed further in my head stocked and flowing dread.
Private Equity is such an insidious name for it.
Under the Rug, as in
As in, trying to sell you on a point with a poem.
As in, objectifying opressifying ossifying old white guys.
As in, forging a future sacrificing folks and calling it progress.
Feels— under the rug
That everything is everything chewed up doesn’t mean you give up.
You chew and spit back.
But that's why I like you— what of it?
Bugs chattering in the breeze. Sparrows murmuring. Lavender lightly lingering.
While they say solar is some best disinfectant, I worry about the ways racial caste capitalism infects it.
Because you know— what's on the other side? What's underneath the rug—
When we creep out from under, up from beneath— and turn up?
Sunlight.
— Adam Powers