Whiny
you say
They’re whiny
Sore losers
They should stop whining 
They lost

You are mistaken
No one’s whining

You don’t understand the difference
because 
your own voice
is all you are used to hearing
and you do
a butt-load of whining
about how precious you are
and about being told you 
no longer should be
so precious considering
your pedestal
rests unsteadily on 
bones

What you are hearing
is not whining

Is keening for
what has died and
for what may yet die

followed by
a war cry

Slowly 
lying down as if there were
long unconscious hours ahead and
not such short time
before necessary waking.

Head
upon pillow as if nothing
has changed at all and 
daybreak will bring just another
round of work and play.

Heavy 
eyelids closing as if there were
no fires burning and no one
screaming for rescue as their roof
tumbles in upon them.

You don’t recognize
this slothful self.
You don’t recognize
this frightened, frozen
self who hears and sees
all this yet decides
to crawl into bed
and fall into such 
an evil sleep

that when you wake
you aren’t even sure
that you should
be allowed to continue
to use your own name
in polite company, you’ve
stained it so.

Predation is 
a lovely thing.

Efficient and
sweet on the tongue.

If a predator
becomes prey, 

no matter as the meat 
is no less sweet.

You aren’t used to it,
at all — this sense 

of being stalked.
This sense of 

teeth behind you
glistening. 

Welcome to 
how it is

for most. As it has been
for those who’ve long lived

ahead of you and
your teeth.  You never

thought of yourself
as a predator and

thinking like prey
doesn’t come any easier —

those have never been
your terms. Welcome, then,

to the new dictionary
of how you are going to have

to survive. Learn 
predator, prey, consumer,

consumption, product, 
commodity. Learn

escape, camouflage, 
resistance, flight,

fight, fight or flight.
Learn or die. Remember

that you started this
and were oblivious

to how it worked
for a long time. Try to forget

how sweet it tasted.
Try to taste, instead, the fear

in the meat you used to savor.
Taste it on your own lips.

“I’m beginning to lose faith 
in this nation,” they said. 

I am struck by the word
“beginning.”  Tells me much

about how comfortable it has been
for some to keep the faith.

Conjures up a couch made of 
faith, upholstered in red, white, and blue.

As for me: I’ve long had no solid faith
in the nation.  It’s a nation,

after all. It does what they all do
and it’s never been more than half

on my side to begin with. 
I was never comfortable on that couch.

Always felt it was garish and scratchy.
It’s not large enough

for everyone who wants on, either:
too easy to lose your seat 

if you get off for even a second, 
and sitting on that couch, holding your place,

sinking in, it’s been easy for some
to fall asleep. Some folks never get off,

even if there’s a fire. Maybe beginning
to lose faith isn’t so bad

if it gets them off the couch. Maybe
they could come outside for a bit.  

It’s cold right now but from here,
after all, you get the view.

Do you think
it’s really OK to sing
the old songs
of revolution

Won’t we just get
discouraged
that they still 
ring true 

Maybe
it would be better
to write and sing
new songs

although
the old ones
still do the job
pretty well

Maybe it is better
that we learn again
what we thought
we’d gotten past

Remind ourselves 
the Enemy
never really died
It just rolled over

Lay there
playing dead
right next to us
in our own beds

Maybe we mix it up
New songs and old ones
Remake a few
for how we sing today

Maybe we rise up
from this poisoned bed
singing whatever we’ve got
As long as we rise

we got this
As long as we sing our way
down Freedom Highway
we got this

in movies
they show people
in submerged cars

taking last desperate breaths
from a pocket of air
trapped within

red car blue car
they crash
people drown

would it matter to you
whether your death car
was red or blue

if whoever drove it
off that road
not only escaped

but jumped and left you behind?
if this were a movie
I could see why

you might care —
visual impact, style — 
I could see that

if this were a movie

1.
Dreamed I stole 
an exquisitely tattooed horse —
a dappled palomino inked
to resemble Belleek china — 
saddled it and rode it expertly
from the city of Worcester north
to the city of Fitchburg
and arrived at a coffeehouse
which was somehow
attached to a stable
empty but for old straw and
an ancient radio tuned
to play only the songs
it played when it was new,
to which the horse and I 
performed dressage and
poetry for no one as
the coffee house had closed
hours before, leaving me
to realize at the end
that I had miles to ride
down unlit roads
and had forgotten
all the expertise I had used
to dream my way there.

2.
Dreamed I carried 
a lucky coin stamped
with a face I could not name;
although a name floated
upon my tongue
whenever I rubbed the coin
between my fingers
in my pocket, I knew
that either it was
the wrong name,
or it was
the right name and 
once I pronounced it,
the face on the coin
would change.

3.
Dreamed of standing
by an unlit roadside — 
the road south,
the road home.
No horse to ride,
no knowledge
of how to ride.
No jukebox
in which to plug
my lucky coin for
a proper song to make it
better.

4.
Awake.

First step home,
taken in silence.

Second step home,
an unaccompanied dance.

Third step?

Currently, all I have
is a dream of riding
a decorated horse
as far as it is willing to go.

the locations 
of certain political signs

on homes and businesses
to avoid

the placement 
of ads on certain sites

so that I will not 
patronize those places

the garages of pickup trucks
with giant American flags and

or giant 
Confederate flags

so that I may hide
from them

the stores that sell
certain products

I will not purchase
now or ever

the comments of people
I thought I knew

so that I may
un-know them

Filing

all of this
for now and the future

What I do with the information now
will be predicated upon the now and

what will happen in the future
will happen 

A Friday night
at home, my head
sore and full,
my heart empty,
collapsing
on its hollow core.

As the known world
is bathed anew
in harsh light
and the shadows
become deeper,

I look at the walls
around me.  Tonight
they are cocoon, tomorrow
they may be prison or
casket  —

or barricade. If so I may
become a warrior tomorrow

so I’ll take tonight for peace
and sleep well, even if I must keep 
one eye open; hold love close
in case thieves come for it in the night

as they’ve always come in the past,
a past many of us have grown too soft
to remember.

We are remembering it now,
have taken night after night
to do so, to get ready, to toughen
up — tonight, though,

I at least will be
at peace before
looming war.

I can’t refuse this heart
this moment of calm tonight

as I cannot say
when or whether
I will find one
again.

to the co-worker
who got into my face
thirty five years ago
and called me selfish 
for having no children,
planning to have none,
and refusing to explain why;

to the dentist who looked over
my prescription listing, saw
Lithium and Seroquel,
then asked me if I lived 
in a group home
as he picked at potential cavities
in my blood filled mouth;

to the supposed buddy
who suggested,
none too gently,
that I was too “addicted to 
recreational arguing”
when I pushed back
with passion upon
her dismissal of
my rising fears;

to the manager who chided me
for not being a leader, 
for being too moody,
for wearing my sorrow
too openly,
for exuberance beyond measure
in strange moments,
for in general
not fitting the mold;

to all the friends who set me aside
for my toxicity and disturbances
of our social fabric, to all the friends
who stepped away and turned away
because I was difficult, to all the friends
who laughed it off and said I needed
Jesus or sleep or exercise or smudging
or less of one food and more of another,
less of one drug and more of another,
less of my headspace and more of theirs;

to the therapists who didn’t listen
or did and misheard 
or did and heard right but
cared only for the text book answers
and the end of the fifty minutes
couldn’t come fast enough
until there I was, standing outside
yet another door.

Thanks due to all
for those rides along this road
that got me here 
on this December night — broke 
and broken, old and
in the way, terrified of 
real demons afoot in the land
and not just in my head.
Because of them

I know how to bite a bullet
and not chamber it.
I know how to
look pity
in its jaundiced eye
and spit
the same way I spit
into clueless
dismissals and clumsy attempts
at comfort.

I may be 
all messed up,
but damned
if I don’t suspect
that I’m better equipped 
for what this
messed up country
is about to do
than some of my 
well-adjusted 
friends and acquaintances
will ever be.