the black cats may need to live
under gormless lapdogs
who’ll lick any hand that pets them
the discommendation of our shadows
will yield no pure land
but will yield a living world –
annoying and disappointing
tolerable and real
and premised on building instead of predation
We would do well to learn from the French,
but while they took it farther,
they learned it first from us.
Dispelling monarchies is all-American.
We play dress up and imagine our future,
this time as frogs, masked in agency
with an unordered cacophony of ribbits
loud enough to shout sleep away from the guilty,
an insistent drone day and night,
We agree, we agree, no kings, no kings in America.
Sometimes a lie can hold
a truth too big for facts,
refill a rainbow with wonder
after it has been taken apart and rebuilt.
But stories are not tame creatures.
A well-treated one may offer comfort,
but a mean one battles with reality
like squid and whales, red in verb and symbol.
And sometimes a lie gives permission,
a way to do what cannot be said.
To craft a narrative that we are under attack
from an armada of small boats
and must justly go to war.
To cut the thumbs from the scales
and let merit ascend
in just the way that restores received hierarchy.
To say we’ll crack down on criminals
so we can disappear brown grandmothers
and undesirable babies.
And meanwhile, at the edge of my town there’s a forest,
and since my daughter was small I’ve told her
that a unicorn lives there,
and to make sure she takes care of it.
I’m so tired.
The kids are screaming.
My parents are screaming.
I’ve been screaming.
I’m so tired.
My boss has been screaming.
We have to do more with less and even if
rates can’t go negative my interest has.
I’m so tired.
I know running the creative engine will make
me feel better but there’s not enough
gas in the tank to make the van go.
I’m so tired.
The red queen is screaming
her head off and I’d rather do the same
than keep running just to stay in place.
I’m so tired
that I might just
shut
down.
For the fever to pass I will have to rest –
pause the march, to try to recover my health.
It may not work, but I have to try,
I might only slow decay, or I might stand again.
A citizen mother and child
are separated and detained
for hours, for speaking Spanish
in a public park.
That could have been me.
A researcher complained
over text about the suicidal
destruction of science and got
deported without saying a word.
That could have been me.
A protesting priest
holds up his hands in supplication
and takes a pepper ball
to the head.
That could have been me.
Activists are threatened
with arrest for shouting legal defense
strategy to migrants as they
are disappeared.
That could have been me.
The undesirables and degenerates are made
to register themselves. Hundreds,
thousands, who could have passed for fash
put themselves on every list.
That could have been me.
People hide their neighbors
in attics for days, for months, for years.
Some are caught and unpersoned, but
the rest are an ark of community.
That could have been me.
All the citizens are rounded up in the square.
Who threw the sabot into the machine?
the men with guns bleat at us.
I raise my hand, as do we all. We say –
That could have been me.
