Invaded

He sends his agents into streets
where crime had fallen to thirty-year lows,
claimed crisis where statistics showed success,
spoke of murder while homicides dropped by half.

He invaded his own country today
not with tanks rolling over bridges,
but with badges and badges’ authority,
FBI agents patrolling neighborhoods
that never asked for occupation.

Seven hundred thousand people
who cannot vote him from power
watch federal boots on familiar ground,
watch democracy pretend law and order
while their elected leaders stand aside,
powerless against constitutional loopholes
that make citizens into subjects.
They will claim they “were only doing their job.”

He targets those with nowhere to run
the homeless swept from sight
like inconvenient truths,
their cardboard democracy
no match for his manufactured emergency.

And I remember Kent State,
how authority turned on its own,
how “law and order” became
four dead in Ohio,
how power protects itself
by calling resistance riot,
calling truth disorder.

He invaded his own country today
with lies about crime,
with federal force against local choice,
with the slow strangulation
of what we used to call
government by consent.
Tomorrow he will call it victory.
I will call it what it is.

Unsolicited
Current Events
Invaded
Poem By: Laura Gerling
(c) 2025

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