When You Don’t Know Someone it’s Easier to Fantasize About Them or Murder Them

because we grow up surrounded by images 

and stories in books, movies, television,

because we compare our self with
celebrities and impoverished third world
countries and friends and family,

because we fall in love with beautiful strangers
and imagine dating, fighting, loving, sex, the wedding,
and growing old together before we even know
each other’s name,

(because we hunt for truth and protest and hate
injustice and discrimination and racism and stand up
to fight but go home to sleep at night
in a warm bed, in a heated house, in the winter,
in a safety bubble of middle class),

because we buy gas from the pump
and don’t have to go inside to pay anymore
and even when we do, we hand our money to a face
that could easily be a robot and therefore isn’t human,
doesn’t have kids or bills or stories or hunger or tears
or grief from the loss of a cousin who died after killing
a teenage combatant in Afghanistan once upon a time,

because we laugh at each other’s pain
just like we laughed at Wile E. Coyote
when we were kids or the Tasmanian Devil,
or our brothers and sisters when they fell
off the zip line, face planted in the sandbox at the park,

because we, our self, don’t get listened to,
just liked, don’t get a forum to have our voices heard,
don’t hear the voices of others among the muddled
discourse of American drudgery, slop, diluted outlets
and media sources, that are, one after the other,
a suction cup on the tentacle of politics,
a mash of knots, struggle, futile striving and unrequited
attempts to change systemic oppression that…,

because we all wear masks,
that we create as children, that we don’t know are masks,
that we confuse with our own identity, that are us now,
that we project to the public eye, masks made of skin,
bone, cartilage, blood, saliva, and suddenly
what is real anymore? Who cares if we shoot
each other, who cares if this man gets away
with murder, who cares if this woman spends
the rest of her life in 7x7 prison cell
for allegedly choking her son when
she wasn’t even in the same house when he died,
we don’t know them,
who cares if,

because we don’t live in a world
where we can’t see this dimension of story
that transcends race, that turns my neighbor,
who speaks only Somali, into human,
a human, another human, another one,
just like Michael Brown, just like Eric Garner,
just like me and you and us, we, who can see
beyond the face, who can see stories of people
that are dragged around like tails, tails of tales,
stories of inhumanity that need to be told,
that have to be told by humans if
change is ever going to occur
under the thumb of this militaristic, dehumanizing
social structure
under which we live every day.