ARE WE ON FIRE YET

The Board
Is Set

spoken word
2026

They don’t call it war anymore.

They call it a response. A measure. A strike.
Clean words for clean screens
where a blip disappears
and somewhere a mother doesn’t know yet.

My grandfather flew over Vietnam. He came home.
A lot of them didn’t.
He never really talked about what he flew through —
some things you survive by not saying out loud.

Something split open in me when I understood that.

Then I was ten,
watching the second tower fall
in a room full of adults
who had gone completely silent.

That silence was the scariest part.

And even then, even at ten years old,
I knew that what came next was already decided.
That the grief would be cashed in
before it was even finished.

The pattern doesn’t hide itself.
It never really did.

I have walked through the Middle East.

I have sat at tables I wasn’t sure I deserved to sit at,
eaten food made with hands
that didn’t have to be kind to me
but were.

I have seen how people love there.
How loud their kids laugh.
How seriously they take hospitality —
like welcoming a stranger is something sacred.

Because to them, it is.

These are not the people they describe on television.
They never were.

But the men in the rooms with good lighting
have never been to those tables.

They’ve never walked those streets.
Never learned a single word
of a language they’ve spent decades calling a threat.

They don’t need to.
They have screens.
They have coordinates.
They have the comfortable distance
of people who have decided
that a culture they’ve never touched
is acceptable to destroy.

Technofascists in tailored suits.

Moving pieces across a map.
Real places. Real names.
Real children with the same laugh as your children —
reduced to blips.
To collateral.
To the necessary cost
of someone else getting richer.

The drone doesn’t flinch.
That’s the whole point.

Remove the hands.
Remove the eyes.
Remove the moment a human being
might hesitate
and recognize another one.

And while the blips disappear from screens,
the bills come due at home.

Your paycheck. Your taxes.
Your kid in a uniform
they sold him on with a brochure and a promise
and a plan
they never intended to keep.

They wrap themselves in the flag like it belongs to them.
Like the people underneath it don’t.

Sending other people’s children to die
for a map they’re redrawing for profit.

This is not defense.
This is not freedom.

This is men who have never gone hungry
deciding who else gets to.
Oligarchs playing with real blood,
fleecing a country in broad daylight
and calling anyone who notices
unpatriotic.

They will never understand
what it means to sit at a stranger’s table
and be made to feel like family.

They will never understand
because understanding would cost them something,
and they have never paid for anything
in their lives.

I will not be moved on this.
Not by a flag.
Not by a reason.
Not by whatever they’re calling it this week.

My grandfather flew through hell
so I could have the freedom to say that.
I watched a tower fall in a silent room
and knew even then
that grief was already being weaponized.
I have broken bread in the countries they bomb from a distance
and I know what they’re destroying.

I refuse.
 
Not as a political position.
As a human one.
 
That crack never closed.
 
I’ve stopped wanting it to.
— end —