I want

I want to write poems for construction workers and dreamers
For revolutionaries
For deadbeats and those on the low
I never want to ask please fix us all
I want for us to want
to patch every heart
and pave every road
and destroy every system
that has ever left us
broken. I want to sing
like frank ocean, like wonder
like sonder, like mereba, like the sea
I want to recite the line
Took the wretched out the earth
Called it baby fanon,
I want to call someone baby.
I want to stop smoking because I want to live,
I can only love my comrades if I live,
and I want to clean my room,
I want to clean my room every week
and make my bed and put peppermint in my hair
to stop needing my inhalers
and to inhale solidarity, and to eat the rich,
I want to eat the rich, to cancel the rents,
to know my neighbors
and to know my neighbors
are safe. I want to move like water, to move
from unity to struggle to unity,
to have no perfect world we haven’t fought for.

Copyright © 2022 by Jordan Jace. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 20, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I wanted to write a poem that speaks for itself. In academic spaces, people pay a lot of attention to patterns and hidden meaning, and I found myself really searching for clarity and purpose, and writing this poem was a part of building that for myself. I wanted to write a poem about optimism and fostering a culture of revolution, and this is the result.”
—Jordan Jace