They Voted for Him
No Kings
Inspired by my poem “They Voted for Him”, this piece captures the moment the illusion cracks and truth can no longer be ignored.
There are times when the truth does not arrive gently.
It does not knock politely.
It does not ask to be made palatable.
It breaks through.
I wrote this poem almost a year ago, in the aftermath of Kilmar Abrego Garcia being taken and in the sickening clarity of learning more about ICE, detention, deportation, and the machinery of state violence that so many people are taught to look away from. I wrote it because I could feel something cracking. Not just politically, but spiritually. Morally. Humanly.
Now, a year later, it feels even more relevant.
We are living through escalating war, unchecked cruelty, propaganda dressed as patriotism, and the kind of public rhetoric that would be unbelievable if it were not happening right in front of us. Trump spent Easter posting the kind of unhinged, venomous nonsense that would almost read like parody if the consequences were not so real. The empire is loud. The cruelty is casual. The mask keeps slipping, and still people ask us not to look too hard.
But I am not interested in looking away.
I am not interested in making this softer so it can be more easily swallowed.
I am not interested in pretending that what is happening is normal.
This poem came through me in a moment of grief, rage, clarity, and remembrance. It is about power. It is about fear. It is about the stories people cling to when they would rather worship domination than face their own reflection. It is about false kings, fractured mirrors, and the moment the spell begins to break.
If you are here reading this, then maybe you feel it too.
Maybe you have felt the crack.
Maybe you are done being asked to stay quiet while the world burns in expensive suits and holy language.
So here it is.
Not watered down.
Not apologetic.
Exactly as it was meant to be.
They Voted for Him
They voted for him.
Not all out of hate.
Some out of habit.
Out of hunger.
Out of history repeating itself in red, white, and blind.
They voted because fear is louder than reason,
And grief disguised as rage wears a better suit on TV.
They voted for him
because he said:
"I see you. And I blame them."
And they were tired of blaming themselves.
Some knew.
Saw it all
the smirk, the mask, the hollow crown.
They knew what he stood for,
and they liked it anyway.
Because for them,
power didn’t have to be just,
it just had to be theirs.
He sold mirrors to men who feared their own reflections.
Promised freedom in the form of someone else’s cage.
He didn’t hide his venom.
He marketed it.
Packaged pain as policy,
and they clapped while the world caught fire.
And now?
Now the air is thick with forgetting.
Now we are building prisons with the blueprints of democracy,
and calling it protection.
Now we are watching
as truth becomes a whisper
beneath the roar of propaganda.
But we remember.
We the ones with fire in our bones and ancestors in our breath.
We the ones who see the system glitch
and choose not to look away.
We know this isn’t new.
We’ve seen this page before.
But this time
we write the next one differently.
We awaken.
Not with hashtags,
but with hands.
Not with anger alone,
but with alchemy.
Not by asking permission,
but by becoming the ones
who remember how to hold power
without crushing the soul beneath it.
So let them vote.
Let them kneel at the feet of false kings.
We build altars where mirrors used to hang.
We plant seeds where borders once stood.
We speak spells where silence festered.
And when they ask us, "How did this happen?"
We will not whisper.
We will say: "Because pain was politicized,
but love remembered its name."
And then we will hand them a pen.
And say: "Now you write the world you want to live in."
And this time, mean it.