We Are Done

They called us a dream;
bright eyes, pretty smile,
a kaleidoscope of everything kind in the world
They called us a dream;
enthusiasm oozing from every pore,
ambitions lined up like prisoners on a death row
They called us a dream;
and we were naive enough to believe they meant it so
It took us too long to realize,
the perfect world they worked towards,
the world of their dreams
It is to be built on the foundations
of our shattered dreams

They only saw us as a dream
when we fulfilled their purpose,
when we were stepping stones
so they could use to reach the sky,
when we were quiet bystanders in their history,
when we were a token placed on their shelves
to prove the world of their generosity
And then
They have the audacity to talk
about how their dreams aren’t perfectly executed
As if we weren’t slaughtered at their feet
As if our dreams weren’t sacrificed for their purpose

They talk of the dreams that died
But they forget to mention
How in trying to quiten our voices,
They strangled most of us
They strangled the dreams
We didn’t die slowly, withering away under the wings of time
No, they gutted us, took everything worthy out of us
And they kept on taking until we were nothing but an empty carcass
lying in the brutal storm,
When a hurricane ravages through a valley,
only the most resilient and stubborn survive
All that’s left of us is the poison at the bottom
of the barrel in which they were shooting fish
And we’ve mutated enough times
that these bullets we now consume as food
Tearing through their hard shells
spitting out the empty cartridges

Because you see,
Dreams have a mind of their own,
you see, in dreams, you have no control,
And now, You see
You’ve infuriated the dream,
The ones that survived,
we are not the bright-eyed
dream infested children anymore
We don’t contort our faces
into grotesque smiles anymore,
We let our wrath show
And that scares them

After they stole our voices,
we learned new words from the storm,
And the storm wasn’t merciful
and so neither are our words

They ask us questions with no answers
but we’ve learned how to catch the knives thrown at us
with our teeth
and spit them back to their homes

They are scared now and they look amongst each other,
Wondering what went wrong
You did, I say
You took all the kind ones out of us
And from the gaping hole they left,
emerged a nightmare
We are resilient, weather-worn,
Self-taught storms
The dreams turned nightmare
This is your nightmare
Because we don’t sit quietly
while you write history with golden pens
Scrubbing away the stains of our blood from the soil
When you took the kindness out
of this amalgamated existence
with your very own hands
How do you expect us to be anything
but defiant.