I refuse to socially distance;
I won’t give up my freedom.
How short is the distance
between tyranny and freedom!
If politics is war, Republicans have historically waged it more ruthlessly, and more successfully, than Democrats and Independents
To be trapped in an era, this era,
is the poet’s nightmare and delight. O future
readers—if there will be readers—what will you make
of this? What shall I—what shall we—bequeath you?
The true traitor lacks not morals but moral imagination. I shall
no longer grant the premise that we must debate amidst the
rubble of a world the unimaginative have plundered—
A friend texted to say it’s irresponsible to protest during a pandemic. All those people
crowded together become vectors for the virus, which doesn’t care about race. I hadn’t
thought of Covid-19 as post-racial, the enlightened bug.
I so want to be optimistic and airy, to write of
our generous spirit, to wax poetic about moon landings
and beach landings, entrepreneurship, sliced bread,
the assembly line, the World Wide Web. It feels un-American
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 hope it’s not too late to stop the carnage.
America forgives itself so easily, as
though we weren’t forgiving but forgetting.
“How does one with no boots
pull himself up by his bootstraps?”
“Why teach someone to fish
then deny them access to the lake?”
I have lingered too long on the intricacies of bark and root,
of trees as leap into the inverted bowl of a sky I cannot lick,
named comets and coined mythologies while the masters
of commerce discussed business in the other room.