I wrote the poem below because I have grown tired of being summoned.

There is, now, a peculiar demand placed upon the human voice. It is no longer enough to feel, or to witness, or even to understand. Trump, Iran, the economy, climate disasters, and so on. One must respond. Immediately. Publicly. Endlessly. The world has mistaken reaction for revelation, and in doing so, has begun to starve itself of anything resembling truth.

And for a Black writer, this demand is not new. It is only newly dressed. This country has always required something of our mouths, something of our bodies. It has asked us, again and again, to produce. To perform. To translate our pain into something consumable. To make a spectacle of survival and call it contribution. There is a long history here, one that hums beneath every expectation placed upon so many of us, that insists our voices exist not as vessels of truth, but as sources of content.

I have been told, in ways both subtle and crude, that to exist as a writer is to produce. That silence is negligence. That to wait is to fall behind. But I have learned that there is a violence in this insistence, a soft but unrelenting coercion that asks not for your voice, but for its constant availability. And availability is not the same as honesty.

What I know, and what I am still learning, is that the voice is not a faucet. It does not turn on because it is needed, or because it is expected, or because there is an audience waiting with open hands and short attention spans. The voice is something far more fragile, and far more dangerous than that. It requires time. It requires stillness. It requires a kind of courage that has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with refusal.

I wrote this poem because I wanted to mark that refusal.

Not as rebellion for its own sake, but as a necessary condition for a better future. Because if I speak before I have listened, if I offer language before it has earned its shape, then I am not adding to the world. I am merely echoing it. And the world, as it stands, has no shortage of echoes.

Become unusable.