If you’re looking for glamor, doing the most good for people and the planet may not be the place to find it.
Tonight I’ll dream that a colony of ants has dragged
me out to sea, where I discover my belongings and I
have become so much flotsam and jetsam.
Changing the language we use when speaking about injustice does not, in and of itself, overturn the injustice.
On a drizzly morning walk I stopped to let a hearse go by,
its pitch-black paint sweating polish, and as I waited
for the procession I thought about who profits from tragedy,
the business of loss, and who profits no matter what,
In Xinjiang, 7,000-miles
away, a morning sun, reflecting off the
glasses of early risers, the windshields
of commuters, is so bright as to redact
last night’s graffiti: Down with Xi.
If life is a lucid dream or some near-perfect
computer simulation, do I risk waking up
to a world in which I can’t embrace you?
I want to touch what aches in us, the light
we guard to stay alive. My dear, come quick.
I hear a knock; I’m afraid. Is it you?
I dare to open and let hope come through.
I have lived as free as a fragrance on the wind,
as shackled to the earth as the vine that produced it.
May I confess in a poem what is forbidden us in prose?
I hire the police that protect my home from the hordes
that would tax me: I need nothing from the State, and so
give nothing to the State.
I just read that the virus is mutating, anti-vaxxers are joining other unsavory elements to protest public health measures, the president doesn’t see the need for mass testing but is now getting tested daily…