Lullabies for the Unconscious

How are you sleeping at night—
with your forked tongue still slick from the lies you suckle?
Do you press your head into a pillow stuffed with white phosphorus,
softened by the silence of 68,000 children?
Do you hum lullabies in passive voice?
“Both sides,” “regrettable,” “tragic necessity”—
your hymns of sanitized horror
sung in the dialect of distance.

Do you count captives like sheep,
each number a justification
for a scorched nursery,
a shredded limb,
a child’s ribcage cracked open like a pomegranate—
sweet and red and ruined?

I don’t sleep.
I ration rest like the last scrap of bread smuggled past a checkpoint.
Two hours, maybe three,
before the ghosts curl under my ribs
and remind me I’m not doing enough.
My guilt doesn’t whisper—it strangles.
It wraps around my windpipe
like barbed wire dressed as moral failure.

REM left me in 2023,
exiled with the displaced,
starved out of my synapses like the calories choked from a Palestinian infant.
Every time I close my eyes,
I see headlines bleaching the blood off the truth,
I hear analysts argue whether starvation is a tactic or an accident,
and I wake with my fists clenched around nothing
but the knowledge that my words aren’t enough
and my body is too far away to shield theirs.

But you?
You sleep.
You slumber in the cradle of empire,
lulled by the soundproof walls of “neutrality,”
dreaming of civility as tanks shred human skin.
You sleep because the dead don’t speak your language,
and the living scream in a frequency you’ve learned to mute.

Tell me—
when your grandchildren ask where you were
when Palestine was being erased pixel by pixel,
body by body,
truth by truth—
will you show them your inbox?
Your threads of concerned silence?
Your likes on bipartisan war crimes?

Or will you tell them
you slept soundly
while the world burned brown?