Throne of Ash

He sits on stolen continents,
the gangster crowned by history’s debt,
an empire that writes its wars
like contracts —
executed in someone else’s dust.

He calls it freedom, deterrence, defense —
three words polished until they mean nothing
but the sound of metal meeting bone.
He strikes at dawn, declares precision,
and the scoreboard fills with names
nobody in power will say aloud.

They say collateral.
They say targets.
They do not say children.
They do not say schoolyard.
They do not say body beneath white cloth.

Beside him sits the throne of another —
a war criminal in tailored calm,
issuing phrases like strategic necessity,
as missiles arc over cities,
as oil slicks reflect a sky heavy with promise
and betrayal.

They map the world in lines no one drew,
in borders that remember violence
before they remember water.

The maps are redrawn in blast shadows:
Tehran smolders,
minarets trembling like wounded voices,
and hundreds of lives flatten into statistics
before the cameras load their next bullet.

Over there — in cities just old enough to know loss —
civilians count their empty rooms,
learn the shape of silence in rubble,
try to remember the texture of tomorrow.

They do not know whether nations will vote
or whether ceasefire is a word that tastes like ash.
They only know the weight of the morning.

And here — in the capitals that never feel the fire —
the gangster on the throne raises his glass,
declares it necessary, declares it justified,
as if bombs could be explained
into innocence.

The war spreads like ink on water,
not confined to fields or borders,
but to every body that stands in the wrong geography,
that bears brown skin in a white supremacist place
when the powerful choose to solve their fears
with steel and death.

This is not destiny.
This is not history’s arc.
This is politics with no translation
for the people who die first,
whose names are not carved into monuments,
but who are buried anyway.

Here are the thrones:
one built on oil and credit scores,
one built on ancient claims and fear.
And here are the people:
smoke and bones and unfinished poems,
living where others decide which cities will burn.

This is the inheritance of power —
not peace,
not protection,
but the thunderous echo
of bombs named for anything
but the children they killed.