I wrote this poem the way one discovers a bruise, suddenly aware it had been forming beneath the surface, darkening into visibility only when pressed.
It was written in Spanish, though its language felt more ancient than that, as if catastrophe had its own grammar that predates our modern tongues.
There are certain poems that arrive like transmissions from a collapsing star.
Dense with impossible imagery, radiating a light that burns cold.
This piece emerged from that space where social injustice meets personal amnesia, where the failure of our existing institutions becomes indistinguishable from the failure to remember someone walking away.
Something about their cadence suggested inevitability, not prophecy, but documentation.
As if someone stood at their window during democracy’s final fever dream and simply recorded what they saw: the bureaucratic revocation of freedoms that never truly existed, the fairies dying quietly in their cells while we debated definitions, the moment when forgetting becomes not just survival strategy but an active choice.
The first time I read it, I was sitting on a day where the morning light should have felt warm but didn’t.
Outside, ordinary life continued its pretense.
Cars passing, someone laughing too loudly, a dog barking, a middle aged man lighting a cigarette.
But the poem knew better. It understood that collapse doesn’t announce itself with sirens. It arrives in the space between “you walk” and “I forget you,” in that active choice to let someone dissolve from memory while the world burns with impossible frost.
This is a poem for our particular moment of dissolution, when the chains we thought were breaking might have been the only things holding certain doors closed.
When the crow watches, and we’re no longer certain if it’s sentinel or scavenger.
When forgetting feels less like loss and more like the last available mercy.
Never Let Them Through the Door.
It strikes from the Northeast, setting free the sentinel crow
Streets ignite with blue frost
Fairies expire in their prisons
For the tempest of those gone
The hyena settles, serene and grinning
And you keep walking
And I let you fade
It strikes from the Northeast, that territory fear has claimed
The lie they label democracy caves in
They revoke freedom’s expression, bedrock lacking
Streets ignite with dark wine
Free souls perish
The mad dog’s chain snaps apart
Filth rains from the skies
And you turn back
And I let you fade
And everyone else vanishes from memory
Never let them through the door.