Who will stand up for Myanmar
when life itself has been gunned down?
Who will stand up for Myanmar when
Being is held in such low-standing,
who will stand up for Myanmar, who
            believes Western democracy is real,
            who believes the West is real.
Who will stand up for Myanmar
            who would stand up herself
            if not for the Golden Triangle,
“[F]or the poppy rules the world” (Jim Morrison, Paris Journal)
as the whole world is colonized.
Who has stood up for the memory
            of the 8888 Uprising,
Who has stood up for the Saffron monks,
Who has stood up for the murdered
            and raped Rohingya,
Who has stood up for the million
            who’ve been displaced.
Believes that sanctions will,
            or ever have done anything
                        about this
And who enable the proliferation of
            military dictatorship the world over?
Who will
            stand up for the tortured
                        denizens of Insein Prison,
Who will read the
            interminable discourse already produced
                        on this subject,
And who will read this poem.
Who will protest nonviolently
            to the end global capitalism,
            with the indomitable spirit
                        of a Theravada monk,
And who will unite across
            every religious division
                        arm in arm, who
Will give up the religion of
            global capitalism.
Who will
            wake up to stand up
Dreaming in their violent mythologies
            to know who wrote
                        Burmese Days,
            let alone there’s a country
                        called Myanmar?
Who will stand up for what
            they regard
So cheaply to be bought
Turning the entirety of their backyard
            into a sweatshop.
Who will stand up for the workers
            of Myanmar
Who will stand up for a nation
            not their own
Who will give up the violent dominion
            of all nation-statehood.
Who will stand up
            for Marshall
beat repeatedly in the head,
threatened with firing squad
For merely spitting on a police car.
Who will stand up for Myanmar.
Who will stand up for the migrants
            of Myanmar,
            of the World
forced into modern slavery,
And who will stand up for this fact
that slavery is worse than it ever has been,
            throughout the entirety
                        of your so called progressing of Civilization,
            democratic values!
Who? How?
            When.

Dedicated to my friend Marshall, my friend Dennis, my friend Leo, my friend Stanley, my friend Maung Maung; all the friends of Myanmar, especially every single student that I ever taught.