Naive to mistake composure for ease, 
Voluntary muscles can still be held still, 
even as roiling blood rebels, even as 
proud flesh is remembering its history,
birthright and etymologies, scarring 
these flinching lynch pins remembering, 
that The police protect property, not people,
making ownership the means of production, 
remembering that they compensated slave
owner families on the abolition of slavery, 
paid their descendants reparations until 2015,
(So, I was paying them for owning my family)
Naive to mistake composure for ease.

And the police protect property, uphold 
the laws of our society, the system seethes,
as blind justice cannot see beyond its own
corruption. Here, ownership is the means
of production, land owned is land seized. 
Borders and fences need to be defended.
And the police protect property not people,
Not the involuntary muscle this society still needs
to bleed, to feed the earth, for food to eat,
And I am paying them for caging me,
Naive to mistake this composure for ease.

And since the dawn of society, it has been
echoing on repeat, spiralling scaling symmetries,
they compensated slave owner families
on the abolition of slavery. And the police 
protect property not people like me,
A total war of ideologies echoing on repeat
between those who’d exert control, and those 
who would be free, finally freed,
Naive to mistake our composure for ease, 
For in roiling blood is a raging sea,
And so many world-ending floods 
in prophecies, So, I ask you again,
“Under what powers are you stopping me?”

Rick Dove is a black, queer and disabled writer and activist from London. Widely anthologised since 2016, Rick became National Poetry Slam Champion in 2021, and has published two solo collections with Burning Eye Books.