I Can't Breathe (2020) Poem by Sandy Fulton

'I can't breathe! '
Black men strangled for presumed inferiority by cops with power, manage one last anguished cry before dying of someone else's crime.

'I can't breathe! '
Children and old folks wheezing the air of inner cities, dump sites and toxic paint on interior walls, croak in weak voices barely heard over gasps of asthma.

'I can't breathe! '
Aborigines of all continents, stolen by conquest from their beloved forests and settled on deserts, work in fields sprayed daily with poison, or give up their lungs a few years later to dustbowl death.

'I can't breathe! '
Courageous volunteers of all colors, many of them prisoners, gag it out when the wildfire winds turn and choke them to death or into a lifetime of suffering.

'I can't breathe! '
Cup an ear to hear the faint murmur of today's Asian worker, or the sweat-shop laborer from any time or place, inhaling stinking street smog and epidemic air in a cramped room.

'I can't breathe! '
Words of wise folk muffle through masks, while greedy politicians, and fools who trade truth for myth, cough at each other and spread killer disease everywhere they go.

'I can't breathe! '
Dying soldiers, torn apart, try to force guts and lungs back inside, while their sacrifice fills the offshore bank accounts of the merchants of death.

'I can't breathe! '
Those were the last words of my coal-miner uncle before cancer got him and thousands of others, so why does this generation vote for the emperors of death who carelessly kill the pawns, in a world that cries

'I can't breathe! '