November Odds

November 9, 2016

Until today, I wasn't sure
about my shame. Today,
I'm certain that I'm

ashamed to be American.
We have let ourselves down.
We have let the world down.

There will be no coming together.
Now, there will be nothing but
unraveling. And an end.


November 11, 2016

The stars align against us. Lines of force
collaborate to push us off the edge
into the dark abyss we've joked about.

The pale moon will watch us, pitiless,
aloof as always, indifferent and cold.
The tides will lick our remnants, bones and cloth,

along the shrinking shores, the beachgoers gone.
The earth, as it does, will rearrange itself
and bury the old world in sediments.


November 13, 2016

The waves of calamity
will snap the pilings of
the lovely seaside hotel

and inundate the streets
of Miami, Chicago, Peoria.
The waves of calamity

will sneak in, 0-1, 0-1,
to swipe away accounts
of small businesses and

retirees, of corporate giants
and steadfast institutions.
Waves of instability will

permeate the ether.
The ether will permeate
the air. The atmosphere

destabilized, will assault
the breathers with wave after
wave of unimaginable ruin.


November 15, 2016

Anyone with a skin tone darker than
a tanned Scandinavian
shall be suspect in this new
America. Beware, my pigmentally
challenged friends. Pallor is power
in this new America. Pray for us now
and at the hour of our death.
We shall not be redeemed
except by the circumstances
of our birth. White privilege
shall prevail, forever and ever, Amen.


November 17, 2016

He should be sworn at and not sworn in.
But in the cold start of a chilling year,
the State will swear him in. The State
will sanction its own and our undoing.
He should be sworn at and not sworn in.


November 19, 2016

White presumption menaces all
across the stage again
as if it were welcome. It isn't.

It will kill us all, released in its full
ugliness, again. The ugliest strains
of Europe's insidious history

strut as if desirable, again.
How to resist? Slit the throat
of your white supremacist neighbor?

Push the white Tahoe off the highway?
Stop paying off whatever debt you have?
Incinerate the Prosperity Gospel Church

down the street? Piss on the Republican
next to you at work? Kill the fuckwads?
Destroy their institutions? Burn them all?


November 21, 2016

Ugly men in high places.
Ugly histories in high places.
Ugly tendencies in high places.

The future is ugly- uglier than the past
and the past is ugly enough already.
There will be no redemption.

Expect the worst and your
expectations will be exceeded.
The promise of 2016 is despair.


November 23, 2016

West Virginia, as always,
you are fucked again.

And I don't care. You earned
your plummet to the bottom.

Ignorant fucks. Go eat coal.
Choke to death on hydrocarbons.

Die, ignorant assholes. I just
don't care anymore.


November 25, 2016

Precarity deepens and expands.
What seemed trustworthy once
dissolves in an acid wave

of vengeance politics freed
by the victory of whim over reason.
Regret will come too late, citizen.

What you might have done
will pass through your mind
as opportunity lost forever.


November 27, 2016

When the gun ship comes for you
because you stand in the way of something
someone more powerful wants,
think not of the choices you made

but of the choices others make
without regard for you
and hurl the last broken brick in your hand


November 29, 2016

Things are getting ugly.
Befitting the dusk
before a dark age,

things will get medieval.
Crusades, local skirmishes,
contagion, lots of blood

and corpses. Nation-tribal shit.
Perhaps there will be monasteries
illuminating old texts

on salvaged human skin.
And then, a new black death
and, after, a pallid Renaissance.