Day 5 showed up after a meme. It said simply “immigrants belong in Ohio.” This happens to me when the world won’t shut up long enough for the words in my mind to behave. Memes, commercials, fragments of conversations, and other randomness become lines to poetry.
This series was never meant to be polite, or evenly spaced, or emotionally neat. One poem a day for one hundred days isn’t about discipline alone, it’s about witnessing. Some days whisper. Some days yell. Some days light a match and wait. This for me is mostly about practice, honing my craft, discipline x2 yes, and seeing what my mind will produce for 100 days straight one poem every day.
“I Hope It Burns” is a refusal poem.
Not an argument.
Not a debate.
A refusal to keep explaining what has already been taught, erased, rewritten, and weaponized.
It comes from exhaustion, repetition, and the surreal experience of watching history pretend it doesn’t recognize itself.
This is day five.
I Hope It Burns
What’s going on in society today?
fuck if I know!
One thing’s for certain though
immigrants belong in Ohio
And Utah, and Maine
Washington, Texas, California
New York, West Virginia
Florida, Nevada
And the rest of the United fucking States
This is so redundant for me to
have to explain
I feel like I’m going fucking insane
Did we not learn in second grade, if not earlier,
what the fucking melting pot is?
I mean, if the only Americans are Natives,
our ancestors with palm colored skin
came here on a fucking boat,
took lives and land
How the fuck are you saying no one else can come here?
The whole damn country is built on it
Melting pot this, melting pot that,
American dream washed-up bullshit
doesn’t mean a thing
when no one’s allowed in
Would you like some crushed ice for that burn?
Poet’s Note
This poem is written from repetition fatigue.
The kind that comes from answering the same questions, hearing the same slogans, watching the same cycles spin louder instead of smarter. It is not interested in convincing anyone. It is interested in naming the absurdity of selective memory, of nationalism that forgets its own construction, of classrooms that taught one story and adults who pretend they never heard it.
The geography matters. The language matters. The anger is intentional, not decorative. This poem is not asking permission to exist, it is documenting what happens when the truth keeps getting told and ignored anyway.
“I Hope It Burns” doesn’t end with a solution because it isn’t offering one.
It ends with heat.
With consequence.
With the reminder that stories don’t disappear just because they’re inconvenient.
Day five is a pressure point. It holds tension instead of releasing it. That’s allowed. This series isn’t a ladder toward comfort, it’s a record of days lived honestly in a country that keeps pretending it doesn’t know how it got here.
Tomorrow’s poem might be quieter. Or maybe it won’t be.
Either way, the fire doesn’t undo itself.
