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.
In the boat of myself on this ancient river,
I paddle
then panic
as genteel swells turn to rapids.
The waves soar above my head
and block my vision, foam
surrounds and towers, I am blocked,
I am enclosed and cut off
The stream bends and passes
through a city.
The crush subsides
beneath the monuments.
A fire polarizes the city.
The roofs disagree
and all burn the same way,
but not all catch.
Stone houses a hundred years old stand dark.
An old palace’s moat keeps it serene.
The cathedral has burned a dozen times and been rebuilt.
Ancestral ruins can burn no more.
I wear the city’s history like a cloak
and conjure a fog to put out every spark
before it can reach me.
Battered by the waves I gasp, but do not sink
and ride on toward time’s great ocean.
Americans prep for doomsday
by flexing self-reliance.
A suburban fluoride-free well,
a personal wheat silo.
I broke my leg as a kid
and while in traction
grasped that in a bunker
I would have died.
So when it looked like
the worst might happen,
I began begging in my city,
since it’s wiser to ask someone for help
and then ask them to be your friend
than the reverse.
You, you reading this poem,
are my hedge against catastrophe.
I will hunt and gather for you
if you will make me new glasses when mine break.
Kekule stayed up too late thinking
and dreamed of a snake who bit
his tail, rolled down a hill,
and delivered him knowledge.
There is a solution to this problem
if you will just search for the apple
accept the consequences
and take a bite.
Anything that can’t
go on forever
won’t.
It feels like a crisis
until you burn out
the part that worries.
When babies grow up,
old dreamcatchers, too full,
are buried,
and while their former owners sleep
grow into rainbow snails
whose shells spiral outward, not in.
