Poetry

pixabay photo

By

Javed Latoo

To political followers

When you find yourself blindly following a band

Following a leader

Their rhetoric, their hypnotising opium

When you end up defending

Every stratagem

Like an automatic reflex, when

Your reverence becomes

Unshakable

Like a delusion, when you

End up practicing

Selective empathy

Like a skill hardwired into a brain, when

Your rationality

Becomes scarce

Like in an amygdala hijack

When doubting “others”

Becomes a default mode

Like an evolutionary trait

When your opinions, your paradigms

Become fixed

Like two plus two equals four;

Then all that you embody

Is fear, is intolerance, is tribal,

Is a heap of dung;

Then all that you encourage

Is fences, is ghettoes;

All jaundiced, all retrograde.

Javed Latoo

Javed Latoo is a senior medical practitioner based in the UK. In his spare time, Dr. Latoo writes poetry as a hobby. His poems have been published in literary journals and magazines (both print and online) as well as in anthologies. Dr Latoo likes to use poetry to explore philosophy of life, mental health and neuroscience. He likes to write in the language of ordinary people, about their ordinary thoughts and their ordinary insights. He manages a UK project called “The Beautiful Space- A Journal of Mind, Art and Poetry.”