Like Gaza, the acts of genocide are hidden beneath the manufactured reality we are presented with, but you don't need to kill with guns and bombs when you can starve people out, deny them medicine, and make their very existence illegal. The methods differ, but the systematic elimination remains the same—dressed up as urban planning, healthcare policy, and law and order.

They draw the lines like battleplans in red ink on city maps,

mark neighborhoods for"renewal" and "development,"

while sirens wail through streetsthat once held families

now scattered like autumn leavesbefore bulldozers.

The medicine costs more than rent,

the rent costs more than wages,

the wages buy less than silence

from those who make the rules,

and food cost prayers and tears,

no money to buy it.

Buses roll through midnightstreets

carrying the displaced to nowhere—

one-way tickets to forgottenplaces

where the forgotten go todisappear.

Unmarked vans and unmarked people

appear and disappear in thestreets,

Tallying their kills—

the ones they didn’t have to buy abullet for,

or make an effort to relocate,

because they died on their own,

No medicine for the ill,

no doctors for the sick,

no food for the hungry,

no shelter over their head,

to shield them from death’s scythe.

But the wheel keeps grinding,

and yesterday's planners becometomorrow's planned,

yesterday's deciders becometomorrow's decided upon,

as the hungry machine demandsfresh fuel.

The middle class discovers

their bootstraps have been cut,

their savings evaporated

in the same heat that consumed theothers.

Now they stand in the same lines,

hold the same cardboard signs,

learn the same bitter lessons:

that the bottom has many floors.

The wheel keeps grinding,

grinding down,

grinding through

every layer of society

until only the grinders remain,

feeding each other

to their own machine.

And still it turns,

this engine of elimination,

creating what it destroys,

destroying what it creates,

an ouroboros of inequality

eating its own tail

in an endless feast

of systematic starvation.

The last ones left

will draw new lines,

mark new maps,

find new others

to feed the grinding wheel

that grinds forever

in the heart

of empire.