024 — Reauthoring the Contract | Talon Z. Gray

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This is my vote.
These words are my vote.
This page is my vote.
Hear me—here, now, everywhere.

I built the bridges that carry voices, yet mine dissolves like vapor.
Erased before it even reached the box.
A phantom vote in a rigged game.

Do the right thing, they said:
— Sold the car.
— Dodged the homegrown scams.
— Learned the traps.

Your home is a nightmare in escrow,
a prison cell dressed as paperwork.
Status: “less erased.” Score: 42 out of 500.

The agency tracking my presence
is as fragile as a dandelion puff.

A silent vote isn’t absence; it’s refusal.
A haunting in democracy’s machinery.

I am not one of them; they do not hunt me.
But naturalization waits for no one.

I vote this, and vote this, and vote this—
each mark a plea to exist.

To live without choosing is the burden
of those who carry a nation’s weight without its privileges.

I’ve paid in full, and still they demand repayment.
They broke my kneecaps, clipped my wings.
“Glow for us under the 24/7 lights,” they say.

My hands pass through ballots like smoke.
Taxes? Real.
Debt? Real.
Dreams? Real.
Yet I remain a ghost, peering through the glass.

The system whispers:
“You are not real enough to choose.”
“You are exploitable, not sovereign.”
“You are mist between shadows.”

The river carries their voices—
each leaf a vote, each ripple a future.
I stand on the bank,
arms heavy from unseen labor,
mouth full of stones,
watching the currents pass.

Though I built the digital bridges,
I’m still barred from crossing.

To walk both sides is betrayal.
Yet this vote remains,
and it is voted.

In the machine’s grinding gears, divisions harden—
formulas designed to shatter the whole picture.

(The sound of shattering glass—a ballot box bursts into flames.)