let’s pick the stitches from our chests,
unthread the tightly packed sufferring
from our tired hearts,
it’s alright to unleash the pain,
spread your seeds,
i’ll spread mine
lets grow a shared garden,

i can hear that woodpecker chipping away
at your instincts
piece by piece
until your shadow no longer resembles you
a crammed cage of countless other people
screaming and crying
echoing through the empty corridors that lead to a dead-end,
lets put a stop to this suffocating madness,
grasp my out-reaching hand,
we can’t change the past but we can pave a different future,
let’s build in leaps
instead of ripping up crossed paths in backward steps

let it be your heartbeat,
all i can feel is the throbbing heartbeats of scattered souls
inside your chest,

fleeing souls from a bombing of the charlie Hedbo publishing house,
nous ne sommes pas paris
we are of the world
and we cannot contain the pain,

we are the soldiers blocking ISIS along the Turkish border,
we are the innocent Turkish history professor locked up and tortured by his own government for “security measures”

we are the fleeing children
screaming out of the rubble in Syria and Iran,
we are the lost brothers and sisters,
the distressed mothers and fathers,
we are the unborn babies the world will never meet,

we are the starving and poor citizens of North Korea,
neglected by their self-appointed God
who’s riding the waves of nepitism and priveledge
into a frightful self-interested dissent.

we are the dead Syrian child washed up near Australian shores,
the displaced souls on Manus and Christmas islands
battered and bruised from hearing too many “no’s”
seeking respite in the darkness
away from power-fuelled guards,

we are the scapegoats
water tortured and treated like dogs in Gauntanamo Bay,
we are the mourning, fear-driven officers that dehumanised them,

we are the fearful,
the confused.

we are all the missing and shot-down aeroplanes of 2014,
just trying to find our way home.