10-Fake Mustache, Nose, and Glasses

They see the mask as ostentatious irony, 

comical in just how little it actually disguises, 

and they don’t even recognize how it was made, 

the materials it uses. 

After they finished beating us at the protests, 

we stole their batons and melted them down 

to form the frames of our lensless glasses. 

When the adhesives their spies hid 

in the mailboxes exploded, those of us 

who survived gathered what rubber remained 

into noses. And the mustache 

tied to the nose? No special 

origin story there. Just plastic 

in a black zig-zagging pattern, 

the shadowy counterpart  

to a jack-o-lantern’s smile,  

a canopy to the pumpkin’s grin 

so strong that onlookers passing by 

see only vague candlelight trembling. 

So, too, does the mustache hide 

our knowing, mocking grins.