Voices and numbers.

"There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’
There are only the deliberately silenced,
or the preferably unheard."

~ Arundhati Roy

In a world of seven billion, 99% of us are voiceless.
Not because we're silenced, but because big,
crude, crass voices drown us out -
even if we have the temerity to speak.

   https://wearenotnumbers.org/category/poems/

Those Chosen by God are 'numbered'.
Battalions are numbered. 
Victims are numbered - and divided into classes. 
It goes without saying that
40 killed in self-glorifying Paris
is much more shocking
than 40,000 in Sudan.

Graves are numbered
(mine, so far empty, is 1-C-64,
though I might well be cremated))
even when they are (that horrible expression)
"mass graves" beyond number containing the unnamed
once known only to a few, and the unnameable police.

I am a living, breathing little group of numbers - social security, passport, tax authority, smartphone, house number -
all these have to be quoted and produced,
and all but the last I forget, 

and then I have to go to an office
with my passport and birth certificate.

I have written 8876 blogs and they are 'preferably unread'.
On the 15th of April I got 850 views.
Good news! I won't even be a number when I'm dead.

All over the world they have burned and poisoned the earth,
are killing the sea and confiscating the sky.
Today is a good day for the weapons manufacturers,
God, guns and individualism.
Tomorrow is always another day
for the numberless to die.

https://wearenotnumbers.org/tunnel-for-hamas/

https://wearenotnumbers.org/still-stuck/

https://wearenotnumbers.org/shattered-serenity/