How does it feel to not matter?
How does it feel to suffer at the hands of an unrelenting power?
How does it feel when the whole world watches?

And how does it feel when they do nothing to help?

A blast at a playground,
One of those that seem to happen all the time now.
Seventeen kids, ages fourteen to nineteen.
Bright red skin peeling, exposing ivory flesh beneath.
Ten die.

But no one cares.
They know, but don’t care.
They see the videos, “How terrible!”
But they don’t care, not really.

Don’t tell me they care.
Don’t tell me they’re trying.
If they really were. . .







we’d already be saved.








Government helicopters hover above our schools.
“Why hurt us when we’re at school?!” a thirteen year old burn victim cries out.
Good question.
But why hurt children at all?

The kids,
They’re taken to our “hospitals.”
To our tents which reek of burnt flesh.
To our tents, which don’t have enough beds for the patients so we sprawl them across the floor.

I may not be powerful, but I can still help.
As I go to fetch the gauze pads,
I see the doctor plead for a father to move out of the way.
“Please sir, let me treat her!” she asks.
But he doesn’t seem to hear her,
He’s too busy hysterically sobbing over the burned body of his eighteen year old daughter.

One of the doctors sneaks out after two in the morning.
She lights a cigarette,
I watch her take a shuddering inhale.
A few more puffs, then she comes back in.

I ask her, “Are you alright?”

“No,

I'm angry."

The whole world watches us suffer.
They watch our kids die.
They see our homes being destroyed.
They have the power, I know they do, to save us.
But they won’t.

They don’t care. . .


not about the children made into statues with poisonous gases


not about our destroyed homes, towns, and cities.
And especially not about the fact that we are suffering, and have been for almost three years.