Poetry Collaboration – Apathetic Implosion
I’ve been dying to introduce this poet and poem to the Evlove site all week.
Simply because of how amazing the poem is, how well it goes with the entire mission of the Evlove brand, and how much I respect the artist.
Chimdi is a talented Maryland poet that attends UMBC!
Working with him was so easy and I hope this isn’t the last time we collaborate on a project.
I look forward to his friendship and future poems.
Thank you again Chimdi…if you want to personally thank him yourself, connect with him @TrillKozby!
You can find the entire manuscript below:
My first niece’s name is Jiya
She’s chubby as the Boy Scout character from the movie UP
With a cry that’s seldom heard
But loud enough to wake you up out of the master bedroom from the basement
Her eyes glimmer like a tsunami playing ping-pong with rays of sunlight
She’s the most beautiful girl, I’ve ever seen
And I can see everything God ever made precious in every corner of her toothless smile
This must be what humanity was meant to look like
But that’s hardly the case
The world has never mirrored me an image that replicates what I’ve seen in Jiya’s face
We’re living in the times were compassion is no longer commonplace
And it’s sad, but we’ve found comfort in that
We’re numb to the facts
Millions die while we turn our backs, but who cares, they’re simply numbers
Wars devastate entire countries and the only thing we wonder
Is whose going to be there to take the resources that can be plundered
Rollo May defined apathy as the opposite of love
And Horace Greeley defined it as living in oblivion
And what this meant, for me, is finally setting in
We don’t love humanity
We turn a blind eye
Billions can be decimated and we’ll only be happy to have survived
Billions of what is purposely left unspecified
Because for some, currency is more treasured than lives
We are no longer connected
The biggest failure of Mankind is feeling as though we were indebted
By the world, the way of life we were fortunate enough to be blessed with
And we believe others just weren’t as lucky
We hear of starvation while we practice gluttony
We hear of poverty and never practice budgeting
We hear of genocide and then devalue our lives
We hear of pestilence and don’t think to donate a dime
Ideology dated back as far as 1869
Seems to be where most of us still place our pride
Survival of the fittest; this world was made for the strong to thrive
And if you cannot, you simply don’t deserve to be alive
How cruel, but still consciously or subconsciously true in all our minds
Otherwise, why can’t we help?
We appoint leaders to do the work, but we never appoint ourselves
Then we don’t hold these leaders accountable
When they pillage the same individuals in distress
We simply, rinse and repeat – the process will continue til complete
And there’s nothing left
No more resources to deplete
No more wealth to steal
No more false flags for wars
No one left to kill
Cause we’ll all be gone
Because a system we could’ve long destroyed
But, we’d much rather be apathetic and watch it be prolonged
A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave
A quote from Mahatma Ghandi
That speaks volumes for the humanity we’ve seemingly lost these days
We are not a world of cowards, we love deeply; we’re simply lost in our ways
Society has pushed us into a prison of our own individualism
And we perpetuate this system with our ghastly indifference
And this has to stop because we’re all linked
A hard concept to grasp, but one truer than what we may think
I am not oblivious to the fact that at some point Jiya will come of age
Realize how terrible of a world she lives in
And that glimmer in her eye, which symbolizes all the innocence in existence
Will begin to fade
So this is far from a revolutionary drumbeat
Not a call to action, nor a message to stir up outrage
Only a divine intervention, a cause worth a mention
To hopefully elicit even the most minute of a change
Because humanity must be what saves humanity
There is no other way.
Enjoy and tell us what you think!
Send all story submissions and ideas to theevlove@gmail.com!
