Mutopia

Once upon a time

Way back in the future

There was a mystic land

Hidden from the view

Of those who had deliberately blinded themselves

It was a land of bliss and silence

Ceasefires, armistices

And peaceful violence

On pen and paper, we live under the same blue sky

But you'd have to visit Mutopia

To know the sky has been torn off

And snatched like paternal property by brothers

Into sections and pockets

The ones with voices

Have gardeners to prune their sky

The skies of the rich

Sprout rainbows daily

Beautiful sunsets rest on their edges

Like birds on a parapet

And colors - blue and green and yellow, red and orange

Merge on the canvas

Like on a palette

The sky of the poor is barely a sky

A tattered roof of twice-beaten aluminum sheets

With holes the size of eyes

Gaping down on them

Like Gods from Pluto.

Their sky has leakages

So huge Dr. Fixit couldn't fix them.

Every night

The sky comes crashing down on them

Raging thunder and brewing storms.

In Mutopia they aren't allowed to use their brains

The loud men buy them and cage them in chains

The silent remain silent with nothing left to say

The words choke on the tip of their throat

Swallowed down like diamonds and coal

Thinking is still permissible by the Mutopian law

But lines have been laid down

Like railway tracks

On which your train of thought can run

And Derailing is dangerous.

Article 123 of the Mutopian Constitution lays down

That dreaming, being injurious to health

Has been banned from the nation.

The Mutopian Mayor

Is the only one allowed to speak

And he mumbles into microphones

The heritage history of future mystery

Of the silent mystic land of Mutopia

He shouts out loud

About the need for silence

How millions of rebels are forming illicit associations

In which they squeak and quibble and chew and nibble

At the foundation stone of Blame-o-cracy

The police are doing a good job he said

Silently silencing the outcries of pain

The pangs of labour

The Clarion call for freedom

The shrieks and shouts of men and women

Gone mad with the unbearable weight of this silence

That is so deafening

Until they go deaf

To all external noise

You burn a pressure cooker for too long

It whistles and whistles and whistles

Until

It explodes

The voices get loud

Inside their heads

This crazy crowd

Of words piled on unsaid words

The heavy heart inside their rib cage

Growing wings like birds

Before they can fly out

To the sky

And be one

Be one

One

With the sky

In the heads of dreamers

There is only one sky:

It is an untainted blue

And the sun every morning

Peeping through the curtained windows of palaces

Shines the same

Through the pores in the tin roofs of huts.