My homie, full of brief fire, declares he’d help kill  
and I say “Nah, free them people,” and he has ceased  
to admit what I, too, cease to admit: in this cage  
we don’t know how to talk about politics.

There ain’t no Kant here, no Augustine, or political  
thought leader without Machiavellian teeth. We kill  
the parts of us, or at least bury the bones, that ceased  
to be useful in the jungle. Our tongues are in cages.

Our eyes are in cages. Our hearts, in cages.  
Yet, there are no wars here now. Only prison politics  
for my homie and I to profit from or dead  
the smaller beefs until the gangs have ceased

the battle over disputed territories. War never stops;  
it hibernates, even here in the joint—cage  
governed by shadows, they are living the politics  
of occupation, trying to avoid being killed.

Meanwhile, my homie and I count years as we feed  
the beast of time we are lucky to have. Our bodies began,  
long ago, and still, to be seen and classified as field  
weapons in this occupied land of the free.