You get the memo. The one that says "Be Neutral."
And your gut twists like a paperclip in a bureaucrat's hand.
Neutral. A clean word for a dirty game.
It means stand still while the room burns.
It means nod slowly as they tell you the sky is green.
And you want to serve. You really do.
You signed up to be a pillar, not a pawn.
But the pillars are rotten.
You see the filings that go missing.
You hear the whispered edits in the final draft.
The gentle, legal, corruption that doesn't scream...
It just types quietly and backs up its files.
It's the sick joke they never tell you during onboarding:
Your duty is to the public, but your silence is to the chain of command.
And the chain is mostly used to whip things into shape.
So you sit at your desk, a good soldier with a leaking conscience.
You draft the talking points you know are built on quicksand.
You become a master of the passive voice.
"Mistakes were made." "The situation is being monitored."
You learn to translate truth into furniture polish—
makes everything shine, but you can't eat off it.
And the revolution to serve the people?
The revolution will not be minuted.
It will not be found in the "For Information" section of the briefing book.
It will not be approved by Communications.
It will not be a fucking webinar.
The revolution is the gut-punch when you realize
your pension is a down-payment on your soul.
It's the quiet fury of the competent,
watching the incompetent fail upwards on a rocket of lies.
It's the truth you have to swallow every morning,
that tastes like someone else's bile.
So what do you do? Blow the whistle?
And become the story instead of the one who tells it?
They build the cage out of procedure and pension,
and dare you to rattle the bars.
It's a special kind of hell,
to see the fire and be handed a bucket of gasoline
with the words "Follow Protocol" printed on the side.
So you see the corruption. You're not crazy.
You feel the lie. You're not weak.
That knot in your stomach?
That's your humanity, refusing to be processed.
That's the last piece of you they haven't figured out how to file in triplicate.
There is no clean answer.
Just the daily choice to be a quiet accomplice or a loud martyr.
And most of us are just trying to find a third door...
one that doesn't have a sign on it yet.
On the Style & The Dilemma
This piece draws from the tradition of Gil Scott-Heron, the American soul and jazz poet known as a "bluesologist"—a scientist concerned with the origin of the blues [citation:1]. His work fused music with sharp social and political critique, delivered in a rhythmic, spoken-word style that was both prophetic and deeply grounded in the issues of the day [citation:4].
It is also infused with the spirit of Louis C.K.'s comedy, which is characterized by a painful, fearless "deconstruction" of uncomfortable truths and his own personal flaws, often finding the dark humor in existential frustration [citation:5].
The central conflict—the desire to serve the public good within a system that can sometimes feel corrupt or silencing—is a profound ethical challenge. This poem gives voice to the "sickly silence" that can fall when institutional duty and personal integrity collide.