Art Must Bear Witness

Akira Kurosawa said that "Being an artist means not having to avert one's eyes". I would take it a step further and declare that "As an artist, it is my DUTY to not avert my eyes". I suppose that's where the darkness in my work comes from, that recognition, that facing up to what is coming for me in a few years.... for all of us eventually.
Someday, when I grow up, I want to curate a show of pieces that allow each artist to do a 'rant' on what moves/outrages them most. It would be extraordinary to explicitly allow each to bear witness to what is most important in their lives, hearts, minds....In that spirit, here's a 'political' poem/lyric for which I have not yet made the physical piece:

Dick Cheney, Sigmund Freud And Gianni Versace Go For A Short Walk
Sirs:
When I remember
the elegantly constructed hunger strikes
of the suffragists,
or think of women carving themselves down past beauty,
past loathing, into tinier and tinier dresses,
or consider the mothers, beaten flat as leather,
suckling fly-beaded babies
on breasts that hang vacant
as empty Walmart bags,
I want to give them all paper napkins,
salt
and steak knives.
I want to fire up a Weber grill,
and seat these starving women on the cool grass,
around a checkered cloth
beside the spot you walk past every day,
on your well-marbled calves,
diseased hearts still pumping nourishment
inside your expensive suits.
I will listen, from behind the bushes,
as you discuss with enlightened dispassion
the politics of hunger, bereavement and servitude,
as I pound stakes into the ground
and twist strong wire across the sidewalk,
taut, invisible,
exactly ankle-high.