Protest Poem "An Inside Job" By Alexis Monique Escalante

Photo of Alexis Monique Escalante

About Alexis Monique Escalante

Alexis Monique Escalante, 31, is an activist and artist whose work focuses on issues of peace and equality thought her activism, writings, and artwork. Influenced by writers such as Sonia Sanchez, Alice Walker, and Pablo Neruda, her focus is finding the ways in which her work relates to the rest of the world. As an activist, Escalante has not only participated in many peace and justice events, some of which have been sponsored by International A.N.S.W.E.R., but has also organized hundreds of Florida activists to travel to Washington, DC to protest the war on Iraq.

Escalante is the founder of Some Me of Beauty: Creatively promoting self-esteem and positive body image in women and girls. Her writings and poetry focus on living with a global vision, non-violence, feminism, and the fight against poverty. This folk artist believes that the call for justice and equality is one that can be best expressed through art and poetry and is sharing this vision with the rest of the world. She is a performer of spoken word and her writings have been published in various newspapers including the Orlando Sentinel, Tampa Tribune, St. Petersburg Times and Miami Herald.

An Inside Job

Resolve. Resolve. Resolve.

Has anyone ever told you that you can be confident

and wrong?

You can be focused

and wrong.

You can claim Christianity

and be wrong.

That perhaps your C average only prepared

you to rub the RIGHT elbows and attend

2000-dollar-a-plate

dinners,

while the mother who cleans those linen tablecloths

cannot afford health insurance for the child

who latches at her hanging

breast.

Yale did not teach compassion.

Harvard did not teach humility.

You say you have your daddy’s smile

and your mama’s eyes-

and so did Karla Fae Tucker.
Her right to life was denied

with the stroke of your pen

151 other souls murdered

and it was an inside job.

You on your knees in churches-

Their families on their knees

in front of caskets.

Your right to life and happiness does not extend to all born:

Born into poverty, born

out of wedlock, born

gay, lesbian, bisexual, born

in Mexico but who came

here in search of a better life, born

to pick tomatoes and work

for the very companies that lobby in your favor, born

woman, born

earth loving.

Give me your propaganda

and I roll, smoke, and pass the spliff around

You can keep your rhetoric designed to make me hate

my Iraqi sisters and brothers born,

my Palestinian sisters and brothers born,

my non-Christian born,

non-heterosexual born,

my poor sisters and brothers…

and if Jesus is not a sexy, dark, queer, hippie, free-lovin, sort of Jew,

then you can keep him too.