Born in a tunnel
looking up. There is
so much
light above. There’s a ladder
that begins
above me, higher than I can jump,
the low rung
shining like a sword unsheathed
against me

and everyone else down here.

I don’t have
the strength to climb to it
even if there
were purchase to do so.
I’m so hungry.
We all are, having built small fires
and roasted 
our bootstraps into tough meat
long ago. 

This is a house
falling and 
so many under the roof
will be compressed
into somebody’s unfortunate
consequence

and now
and then an escapee will 
be asked, “wasn’t it worth it
to be out from under”

and they
won’t know what to say
with their flattened faces
grown long and broken from
the trauma of having been 
inside the rotten house
as it fell.

This is a house
falling and
all over the neighborhood
bricks are being thrown into
the yards and through
the windows and

look at all the people
bleeding and calling out
for shelter and protection and
they are asked

“isn’t it nice
to have light from where 
that nasty building used to be”

and they won’t understand 
after being blinded by 
flying glass.

This is a house
falling and 
noise and brown dust
are choking and strangling
people who were hoping
to be heard in the 
stillness after its collapse

and they are asked “are you
better off now that it’s not
holding you back” and

they try to answer in the 
affirmative for those
who were outside already
and missed all the damage
from the moment the damned
house fell, the kids and others
who will benefit in the absence
of the fallen house

while the ones who were inside
and knew it was going to fall
accept death and the weight of debris as
the price of someone else’s hope.

I’m not worried about
the long run with these
barbarians. They give off
the whiff, the white heat
of desperate knowledge.
They know they’re done.

It may take twenty
or thirty years, hundreds or
thousands of dead for that
to come to completion.
It won’t be pretty,
but it is inevitable.

We know it too.
We understand their 
fear.  Which is not to say
we feel compassion for it 

or that we should; there’s been
too much of that already,
too much care for their feelings,
too much accommodation 
to their ideas as we twist ourselves
into painful shapes to prove we
are not the same as them, when truth is

we are not.  Never have been.
Any assumed parallels 
come to a vanishing point
in every single instance.

Plenty of immediate killing things
to worry about
in the air, the water, the heat
and the cold and the growing wilder winds
roaring over us all. They had their hands
in that as well, of course, and soon enough
those things will do their worst.
Who knows yet how we will survive those?

But the barbarians, the torch boys,
the crooked crossing guards, the pale
first responders to dog whistles, the wealthy
in their slit-windowed financial houses, 
the small monsters in the pointy hoods?

They will do their worst, knowing
how little time is left to do it.
Maybe decades,
maybe a century; maybe.
No thousand-year
self-satisfied reign.
No. It’s time.
They know. 

This war
is how they mourn.

In planning for subterfuge
I strive to emulate a mad white dog
who stretches out on snow
in full daylight
and nearly disappears 
while remaining in plain sight
of those willing to look carefully
into that which by its very nature
blinds a viewer and obscures
what is being viewed.

In planning for resistance
I work hard to transform myself
into one of a host of frogs
falling from the sky
onto the porches and streets
of those who do not believe
in such things happening, those
who scoff at the possibility
of humble beings pouring down
upon them in their complacency
and ruining, possibly forever,
at least for a moment,
their paradigm. 

In readying myself
for what is coming
I stare at my reflection 
and think of replicating
the actions of virus, or 
of bacterium — unseen and
anonymous, sometimes
not doing visible damage
for appreciable time, leaving
tunnels and palaces
within the opened body of the host
in such a way
that all manner of new life
may enter and make a home.

In thinking out loud 
of these tactics, I see they may be
terrifying enough up front
to create in the body politic
an unease that will do
half my work before I make
any decision, and when I do choose
it will be a choice
made without announcement, made
for the love of the future, fully aware
of what must come before that love
can openly manifest.

Before we begin,
a quick explanation of the Process

might be in order since
you may be wondering what is involved.

The Process removes
not only color but fragrance as well;

strips away the stain
of your inconvenient birth;

lifts and separates you
from your base;

gives you a flag
to cover your wounds;

is an offer, an estimate,
a matching grant;

allows for some variance
as a flavor, a hint. 

Lucky you —
not everyone

is afforded access
to the Process,

but you look like
the type. You look like

someone who would
do well with it, who

would be worthy of it.
Who would support it

after you’d been through it
Who would help enforce it. 

Who would know 
how to choose the right people

to go through it
in the future.

If from this you don’t
understand completely

how it works,
that’s all to the good.

It’s not necessary to see
all the machinery behind it

as long as you are willing
to go through it. In fact

that might reduce your
willingness, seeing all

the boring milling
and smoothing involved

in the Process.  It might
put you off what we promise

is a delightful result.
What we promise you

is a lightening of
the load you carry.

What we offer is
a great hope; you know,

I’m certain, 
the kind of hope we mean.

The kind of hope carried like
an unquestioned passport

over the walls and fences
you may encounter.

The kind of hope
on which this country was founded.

The kind of hope
that can stop a bullet.

To sing in the mouth
of that which consumes you
is no strategy.

To sing among the teeth
descending into you
is not acceptable..

I don’t care what the positive thinker says
of the need for love and civility.

I don’t care for the One
who said to turn the other cheek.

To open your mouth
and offer hymns of praise
to compliance and martyrdom
as you are consumed
is no good thing.

To be swallowed
without at least attempting
to strangle them as you descend,

to loose your throat
without sticking in their throat,
is not noble.

Is atonal, is
dissonance, is
anharmonic, anti-
melodic. 

To offer your music 
in the presence of that
which only sings your death – 

how would that song sound?

Thinking of
the current
ragtag state of us:

our ramshackle bodies,
crude hovels staggered below
hillside mansions.

As always, our pains
are best explained
in our own idiolects,

so we try to listen
to each other,
to hold on to each other.

It’s not been easy,
this long approach to the 
Abyss. 

To bolster us
as we attempt to bridge it,
or prepare to fall, what we have

is memory, each other, 
attention, connection, 
each other once again;

shared anger, shared compassion;
hope and its near-companion,
each other.

It’s darker than we thought.
Our ramshackle bodies
whisper to each other

in our own tongues
and strive to understand.
Some do, some don’t,

some find it easier not to listen. Not
to even hear. So much shouting,
shooting, fire, gas,

gaslighting that illuminates
nothing but its source. 
Each other, we say. We

reach for each other.
All we have. Our ramshackle,
ransacked lives. 

Our connections. Our hope
that we will find each other
among slow-building piles of ruin.