FEEL FREE

by Nick Allison

Nick Anderson cartoon

To don a bright mask for the faithful to see
To placate the flock and pretend to believe
To drag the dead weight of unbroken chains
To laugh until laughter devours the pain

To plant the old flags and ring the new bells
To raise up the prices and see what still sells
To imagine that freedom is only a jest
To swallow your pride till it rots in your chest

To close all the windows and fasten the doors
To bury your secrets beneath the sea floor
To climb golden stairs till you stand at the top
To fall with the world when at last it all stops

To bolster your ego with glory and praise
To purchase a past with the fortune you’ve raised
To summon the fire and melt back the ice
To never look once at their sacrifice

To turn up the volume and smother the cries
To vanish in shadows and cover your eyes
To cut out your tongue to spite your own face
To put profit above the whole human race

To pull out your hair and to tear at the walls
To pave over gardens and silence the calls
To load up the cannons, the weapons of war
To never once ask who the cages are for

To dream of the faces you’ve lost all at once
To wake with their shadows and feel their cold touch
To walk through the mirror and linger a while
To shine your dark shoes and lie with a smile

To pin every failure on somebody else
To go to your grave deceiving yourself
To polish a crown and call yourself king
To scream for the stillness your riches won’t bring

To weep late at night in a bed all alone
Your palace of pleasure turned prison of stone
Surrounded by ghosts who won’t let you be
You’ll ask yourself why 
you still don’t feel free

Nick Allison is a former Army infantryman, college dropout, and writer based in Austin, Texas. His poems and essays have appeared in The Shore, Eunoia Review, HuffPost, The Chaos Section, CounterPunch, and elsewhere. He recently curated and edited the poetry anthology Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age. “While the Elk Were Moving” is adapted from the introduction to that collection. More of his work can be found at TheTruthAboutTigers.com and @nickallison80.bsky.social.

WHILE THE ELK WERE MOVING

by Nick Allison

To my right,
Longs Peak rises jagged through pine.
To my left,
a wide meadow scattered with boulders—
bones from the old world.
Below, a stream elegies the slope,
snowmelt running fast over stone
worn smooth by thaw and thunder.
This morning, an elk herd passed through—
massive, deliberate,
moving with the grace of dancers,
as if gravity had chosen to spare them.
Not silence,
but the absence of familiar noise.
No voices. No engines.
No signal or screen.
Just the wind-clipped scratch of pen on paper,
and a stillness with weight—
the kind that settles like mist on skin,
that hushes thought.
In the fragile solitude of mountains,
one can almost forget how the edges burn.
Tomorrow I’ll hike back down, return—
to towers, to headlines,
to see what’s become of things—
to see if the center held,
or if, while the elk were moving,
the scaffolding finally collapsed.
He deployed Marines to American streets—
maybe that was the tilt.
Maybe not.
Days fold behind each other
like stage sets in the dark.
Blanket pardons.
Raids without warrants.
Agents at schools,
asking children for names.
Reporters cuffed.
A free press recast as enemy of the people.
The Justice Department, a private shield.
Federal hands bending toward one voice—
like sunflowers to heat.
He speaks of a third term
the way we speak of death:
a joke, until it isn’t.
Warnings come,
dressed in neutral tones:
constitutional crisis,
erosion of norms,
precedent dissolved.
But warnings read like museum plaques
once fire has claimed the foundation.
At some point, it stops being if—
and the only question left
is whether we’re still watching,
or simply learning to live inside the collapse.

Nick Allison is a former Army infantryman, college dropout, and writer based in Austin, Texas. His poems and essays have appeared in The Shore, Eunoia Review, HuffPost, The Chaos Section, CounterPunch, and elsewhere. He recently curated and edited the free-to-read poetry anthology Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age. “While the Elk Were Moving” is adapted from the introduction to that collection. More of his work can be found at TheTruthAboutTigers.com and @nickallison80.bsky.social.