The edge
of my seat
is bent from me sitting here.

Stand up, I tell myself.
A poem can’t save the world. Get
to it.

When I step away from the poem
for a moment,
a world builds itself upon the paper.

When I come back, the room’s underwater
and the poem rises above it,
a white seaport, everything sails toward it.

I go and sit on its docks. What was it
I was thinking before, before the new world
rose in the heart of the poem?

For everyone saying that this election was so close:

I went back and did a little research.

There were elections that were monster margins of victory — 1956 (13%), 1972(23% — that was McGovern/Nixon), 1980(10%), 1984(18% — ah, Dukakis), etc.

But the margin of victory overall frequently isn’t nearly that big.

1976: 2%
1988: 7%
1992: 6%
1996: 8% (this, by the way, was Clinton/Dole, usually described as a blowout)

2000 we all know about.

The roughly 2% margin here was definitely close, but not razor thin.

Stop looking for fraud, conspiracy, and intimidation to explain the margin of victory. While they may indeed have happened, they were not enough of a factor to make the difference.

The Dems got beat because they didn’t have people voting for them.

Remember:

Conspiracy theories let you off the hook for your own responsibility for change.