Walk Don’t Run

Soundtrack:
“Walk Don’t Run,”

but I’m running.
I’m always running. 
Do the ironists
care? How should I decolonize
my shoes
when I can’t stop
to take them off?

There’s a fucking settler
everywhere I look. I can’t
get them off my back, or my 
mind. How does “Land Back”
work when the land
is thick with them and their
history? When half my genes
are settler genes? Maybe
the truest part of me
is settler. I feel
broken settling for that.
Maybe I should surrender to it
and just run through the colony
waving and smiling
till I drop dead and then that hole
they put me in
or  the land where they scatter my ashes
will become land I get back.

And how do I stop
being a capitalist asset
when I’m so damn hungry
and money is so short?
Do the ironists care? Are they still
laughing, calling a dead man like me
who’s running in capitalist shoes
from capitalism and colony and
the endlessly fucking settlers
a lackey?

Maybe the problem is that I’m
running down the top of a fence
barely an inch wide and I can’t decide
which side will cradle me when I fall. 
Maybe I should listen to the words
of the song. 

I don’t trust anyone 
who had a hand in building this fence,

especially me. No Marxist,
no Libertarian, no capitalist 
apologists…settlers all,

and no one able to explain
how to soften the human cost,
how to even partially break
the looming fall.

The fields on either side
are too wide to let this fence
define them, but here I am,
running like it matters 
which side I will die on.