Shouting: A Poem

I worked on this poem a while back. It was inspired by a graphic novel I read in college called Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. My favorite quote of the book was "I had learned that you should always shout louder than your aggressor." Doesn't that seem to be so true in our political debates recently? After all the battles I have witnessed lately on Facebook and at lunch hour and in the media, I decided to pull the poem out again today. This is my product so far.

Shouting

They are shouting.

Words become bullets; piercing small, uncomprehending ears

or eardrums drowned in sticky wax from years of blind

opposition.

But they are missing their mark.

They are shouting.

Frustration boiled over through your radio or television.

A volcano charring the country's foundation with denial.

Or sputtering lava of blame onto one another.

We scramble and search for a button labeled 

mute, but the volume only gets louder.

The speakers are shaking, 

shaking closer and closer to the table's edge.

They are shouting.

With picket signs of blood red words and bandanas tied 

around their foreheads, they scream words like "equality",

"freedom" or "corruption" over and over until ideas become

war chants that sound like "E-dum-shun" or "Corr-free-ty" but never

"Compromise."