Reflections on Censoring Democratic Discourse

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