Category: Uncategorized

I tried once to touch the sun
and broke, my body and mind melting
too close to the source. Another almighty
test that I, like Abraham, failed. 

I fell into the labyrinth to convalesce.
My body healed and my mind wandered
those walls, taking every left turn until I found
the hollow at its core. Then, I could see. 

To burn brighter needn’t mean half a life. 
Turn over, find another wick, and ignite it. 
The melting wax may fall
and build up on both ends.

A paradox, you say? 
Yes, that’s right.
I prove my humanity
by my contradictions.

I swim in my head, a bowl too small. 
I turn and turn, my spine grows curved, 
to echo the walls that lead nowhere. 

I swim faster to try to hasten
the process and find the way out.
I will speedrun discomfort.
The space constricts to compensate.

I despair. How can I help anyone, 
how can I save anyone else
if I can’t even save myself?

Bereft of direction, I stall.
Without design, I rest

and wake to the answer: 
then I will have to save myself.
The walls in my head begin to bloom.

I will place no wager on a living man
so when it’s time for the money to go down
I pick the no less than the sovereign –
we the people
who did not vote for this
misguided and distracted as we may be
we will course correct with better delegates
who will meet the moment
and remember what we always knew
that the road to prosperity is through a
more perfect union.

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.

We grow best as prairies.
Integrated tangles that pull community
in every direction.
Competing for the sun’s gold, yes,
but under the surface we enrich
the soil, planting the next season’s seeds.

You think we consume without thought. 
You plow us into segregated rows,
tell us to rely on synthetic wards
while your mice in trousers rob our grain,
and think our faces will always turn to you
as if you were the center of the universe. 

We are watching you 
and weighing judgement. 
We may lack coordination
but our tender shoots grow
inexorably
inescapably
in their masses
along your length
around your cruel mouth
toward your delicate eyes,
until you blink.

Reading only through windows fogs my impressions.
I forget how kind my neighbors are.

I go down to the street and see gifts change hands.
The lonely find each other and fill each other’s hearts.

Some few of those sad foggy voices are real.
They are frightened by collaboration.

They set fire to the parliament and try to blame us.
We put it out by bleeding rainbows.

We are promised cages
and begin to sing in advance.