Democracy is on the ballot

Democracy is on the ballot this year
but some things will not be:
climate catastrophe;
our holocaust in Palestine;
our direct and proxy violence
in Africa, Latin America, Eurasia;
our seige-by-sanctions
against a third of the world’s people.

Also not on our ballot
are some things at home:
health care for all;
the right to choose;
fixing crumbling infrastructure.

And missing from our ballot
is any real change to the ongoing
mass police shootings of civilians,
civilian mass shootings of civilians,
or any of our “mass” phenomema:
bankruptcy; poverty; deportation;
homelessness; deaths of despair.

Apparently our ballots are so small,
so very, very small,
that they have no room
for anything
except
Democracy.

Roger Stoll lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and has published articles, book reviews and political poetry in Black Agenda Report, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Internationalist 360, Jewschool, Marxism-Leninism Today, MintPress News, MRonline, New Verse News, Orinoco Tribune, Popular Resistance, Resumen Latinoamericano, San Francisco Examiner, and ZNet. Read other articles by Roger.