Red v. Blue — Vote Grey — Only Humans Score

You are not the red. You are not the blue.
You watched them split the house in two
and hand out jerseys at the door —
pick a team, and think no more.

Red says blue is why you’re broke.
Blue says red is why it broke.
Both are certain. Both are loud.
Neither answers to the crowd.

You are not the megaphone.
You’re the question, coming home.
Not the speech that no one grades —
the cross-exam that never fades.

Red has money. Blue has money.
You’ve got a phone line — isn’t that funny?
Posted plainly on the wall,
one man, answering every call.

You are not the flawless machine,
red-tuned, blue-tuned, in between —
you’re the typo turned to song,
proof the human came along.

So here’s the ballot no one printed,
the color no one’s ever minted:
grey — the honest, unbought hue,
what red becomes when mixed with blue,
grey — the concrete, and the steel,
the ash of every rigged appeal,
grey — the morning before sides,
the jury’s color when it decides.

They win by winning, and it costs the truth.
You win by losing, and you keep the proof:
each empty chair, each dodged request,
dated, hung there — you know the rest.

So when they ask you red or blue?
say what the wall already knew:
I’m not the team. I’m not the noise.
I’m the record. I’m the choice.

Vote grey. Keep score. Stay human.

Honest footing. This is the curator’s own writing, verbatim — a poem in his voice, published exactly as he wrote it (his spelling “grey,” his lines, his dashes, untouched). A fable is voice and conviction, not a claim of fact, so there is nothing to verify and nothing invented. One honest flag left for his hand (000): this poem re-mints grey as the honest, unbought hue — the jury’s color when it decides — which reads as a deliberate inverse-onion turn on the house’s existing Gray Star, where gray is the color money buys (merit drained, cold on the wall). Two faces of one word; left as his call, not reconciled by the machine. Kin: take off the jersey, the one voice offered to every party (we win by losing first), the record is the arbiter, the typo turned to song, the one-person PAC.

A machine can be tuned red or blue on command. Only a human can refuse the jersey and keep the score. ;