“Awakening”
By Matt Hunnicutt
We ride a rock through infinite dark
at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour
and our biggest problem today
was a comment
from a coward
hiding behind a screen
with too much power.
We breathe without thinking.
Hearts beat without asking.
The universe spent fourteen billion years
building this moment —
and we spent it
doom-tasking.
Wake up to fear.
Eat fear for lunch.
Scroll through fear at midnight
wondering why we can't sleep —
then fear tells us the insomnia
will kill us too
and we believe it
and we buy the pill
and we say thank you
and we do it again tomorrow —
because somewhere someone figured out
that a frightened people
is a
is a purchased people
and fear
sold by the hour
pays better
than the truth
ever could.
Let that land.
Children — small and soft and open —
hand their whole world
to the ones who are supposed
to be the world for them
and some of those hands
were not hands —
they were claws
sold in human malls —
and we looked away
not because we didn't see it
but because someone made the looking away
feel like
the reasonable thing —
and that comfort
that small
deliberate
engineered
comfort —
cost us everything.
Two nations at war
with the same arms dealer's number
saved in their contacts —
two flags
two gods
one invoice —
and while the ground swallows
whole neighborhoods
that never made the news
they've got us in a cage match
over what to call each other —
fighting over the furniture
while somebody else
is quietly
signing the deed
to the house.
We traded the sacred for the convenient.
Traded the eternal for the instant.
Handed marriage to the lawyers
love to the algorithm
lust to a fiber optic line
that runs straight to the bedroom
and calls itself intimacy —
and we hit accept
without reading
a single word
of what we agreed to.
And the hollow feeling that moved in after —
the one that sits in your chest
at two in the morning —
they gave that a clinical name
put it in a commercial
and sold you something for it
during the six o'clock news —
right between the wars
and the weather.
Pause.
But here —
here is what gets buried
under all of it —
Stars so ancient
that the light touching your eyes
right now
left home
before humans
had a word
for light.
A body that heals itself
without a manual.
A planet that grows food
from nothing but dirt
and rain
and time.
A child's laugh —
one real laugh —
that resets something
deep in your chest
you didn't even know
was broken.
This moment.
This breath.
This one.
Is the thing
they have been working
around the clock
in shifts
to make sure
you are too distracted
to feel.
And it has been here the whole time.
I'm not here to add to the noise.
I'm not here to tell you the sky is falling —
they've got enough people on payroll
for that.
I'm here to tell you
the sky is staggering
if you'll stop looking down
long enough
to look up.
The fog you're breathing
is not weather —
it's manufactured.
And the thing that terrifies them most
isn't a revolution —
isn't a march —
isn't a movement —
it's one person
who finally sees it
puts the phone down
looks at the people they love
looks at that impossible sky —
and says —
“I see what you're doing.
And I refuse.”
That's where it all starts.
That's not a revolution.
That's not a movement.
That's an awakening.
That is what I'm calling for.
