Splintering

Splintery enough 
for ya? Tension —
can’t live with it, can’t
drink enough to kill it.
It’s like walking through
blood soup lately. I’ve got
wet legs and famished
eyes. Did you hear the 
forecast? They say it’s 
all over the whole damn
country and getting worse,
every city’s a flood plain,
every town a fire zone,
every road a rain of bullets,
every kid’s a potential orphan
and every parent’s got a wound 
open for grieving. There’s bound
to come a moment soon
where we stop calling it
bad weather and call it climate change,
stop calling it protesting and call it
uprising, stop calling it a great country
and just call it a country bearing up
against splintering, stop pretending
it wasn’t built on cracks to begin with,
stop pretending it’s not inevitable.