The Phone Videos Will Outlast Them
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The videos and statements exist. Gaps between them are crimes happening in broad daylight.
Someone was alive, then murdered. People held phones and recorded. The footage circulates while federal officials describe something else entirely — their words unable to match the realities occurring. The wounds. This is not confusion. This is them testing us. Can they get us to unsee what we saw?
God knows the answer. Hands shaking. Butterflies absurdly tightening stomachs. Inhales and exhales going shallow without asking. The fist we didn't even realize we were making. Our chest holds the insidious contradictions as tension combined with nausea, as something that won't stop and behave like a decent human being.
So much grief here for the two innocent lives murdered. Rage at the gaslighting. And underneath it all — that weird loneliness of being repeatedly lied to by people who hold power over your life. The emotional weight is not just the violence. It's being told the thug violence didn't happen the way it happened. While surreal bodies are frost blue cold and warm.
The administration is trying to wear us down. Make their version feel exhausting to fight. Our surrender is their godless goal. If our insisting on what we witnessed slows to a halt, they win without ever having to be right.
To lie about this kind of violence is like extending and amplifying it. Their bullet enters our bodies while the lies invade communities over and over. Thank goodness the videos are witness. The statements are erasure. The question is not who is telling the truth — the footage answers that. The question is: what kind of people lie about murders while the fresh footage begins to circulate?
This is Eyes Not Lies. The videos will persist and the false statements will decay and rot over time. Federal authority contradicting us who are the local witnesses. Powers telling the occupied what they didn't see. The disgusting language arrived before the pepper spray, tear gas, and next bullets. Now arriving after — rewriting the event even as the blood spilled on sidewalks and streets freeze dries as a surprising Rorschach.
But the phones were held up and facing the dark rifles and masks. The footage now lives in servers, shares, and screenshots. Beyond their reach.
The phone videos will outlast them.
. . .
For The Witnesses
Fists interpreted as doves
or little birds.
Answers felt, not argued.
A risk.
Yes, we care
is a temperature now.
Yes, we care
stops us every time.
No adverbs. No hedging.
Just the facts
as we know their name.
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26 January 2026
Staying Alive
Author: Oyparaploo
Methodology: Wonderful Garbage
Style: Noir Chanson
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