This poem is inspired by the 7 words banned from CDC's 2018 budget report:
Teachers once taught refraction and dispersion in a class called science
With a sword purge edit, slice the direction of a lexum wave
Droplets sanitize in an arc of seven
Blackout the sun and remove this human spectrum experiment American
No longer shining quite as bright, once I thought I had seen
A dazzling color spectrum
Hide what is weak, cover all tears, conceal fears of inner feminine exposure
Under animals hides of authoritarian repression
The blood life color bleeding
Red from the vulnerable vulva, open heart wound, susceptible girl muscle
That tender inside story
Fear the right of Other, the power to be liable
Covering mouths, cutting out tongues, one phrase at a time
Blot out some part of themselves, erasing letters, imprison the child
Abridging their own maturation by not serving, making moral choices
Choose to champion the voiceless, to be a complete human prism
Instead wear your title banner yellow crown of seized entitlement
Bronze wielding swords on horseback stealing common pasturelands
Dam the rivers, poison word wells, privatizing shrine groves
Pre-emptive claims to sanitize our articulations in one mammouth, federal mansplain
Orange is my coral fetus, amphibian soul salmon egg
Attached to the cantaloupe womb wall
Wash of two pigments
Red vulnerable mother and yellow groom privilege
Like a little carrot, root vegetable handpicked (or not) by it’s
Child- bearer gardner
Gender is a verdant field, flourishing with every kind of herb and grass, moss and vine
Preferential bloom of one’s perennial essence
I’m my own ego sod as you choose your own turf, we quintessential alternative meadows
Blue is the evidence based of a cloudless sky
Fear the day an Emperor makes us call the sky anything but that celestial hue
When we whisper in secret what is true
Because one day he erased it all in a nuclear monsoon
Regret the time it began with the censor of
Seven hues from our democratic rainbow vernacular
Safeguard the science-based indigo evolution of research and examination
Bipedal hominids painting ocre magic under stalactites
Brewing beer, yogurt, by observation, peer reviewed trial and error
Fascination of absolute zero to Hubble Space Telescope missions
Require the experts and poets to hypothesize, measure our orientation
Make a sanctuary for the royal purple of diversity
Multifarious mindsets and a multiplicity of complexions
A medley of judgements, experiences and suspicions
Preserve that prism curve rainbow perception
Septuplicate of words illuminate
Our protesting hands a rising covenant banner
After this storm
We cheek by jowl radiate parts of these seven visible light waves
Supernumerary bands against this cadaverous censor
