Despair
Once I was suddenly attacked in my heart
I tried to speak loudly but failed
I tried again but failed
As I spoke from heart and belly
Once I suddenly got struck
How should I stand before
My students are my audience
I am on the stage
I lectured with full of my voice
Suddenly it was stopped by fear or despair
Now after thirteen years the condition is better
But I faint often
When it rises in my thought
It can’t be exposed
But the fire burned in my heart
Make me cry silent
My breath stops
Life is too short
I think and again despair.
+11+
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
– Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise”
Where do we go from here?
That seems to be the question on the mind of nearly every liberal and progressive since Election Day. Trump’s victory has the left in complete disarray, and despite the terrific show of force that was made during the Women’s March, there has yet to emerge any clear cut strategy for dealing with the Trump Organization that doesn’t involve politics as usual in Washington. The Democratic Party meanders somewhere between mindless navel-gazing and meaningless internecine squabbles, gradually acquiescing to the Trump Organization and the three-piece jackboots of the Republican Party as they rapidly flush large chunks of the federal government down the latrine, flooding the country with piss and shit and fear and despair. Hillary Clinton is in exile, sales of George Orwell’s 1984 are through the roof, and Capitol Hill is looking more and more like the Reichstag with every passing day.
What’s a revolutionary to do?
There’s an argument to be made that trying to reform the Democratic Party from the ground up through things like the 50-state strategy is the way to go. But persuading major coalitions like the DNC and the DCCC to reverse course away from the corporatocracy is like trying to stop a steam train with a penny on the rail; you’re only going to be flattened into something unrecognizable by the rush of so-called “progress.”
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Non Judgement Day is coming
by Tony Nightwalker LeTigre
Last night with transit time to spend
Checked out the skate park under Burnside
Guy wanted to sell a deck for five bucks!
“The bearings alone are worth fifty bucks,”
Said a kid, as we together wished
Between the two of us,
That we could cough up five bucks.
Ogled the old Towne Storage building & remembered
(or imagined remembering) her telling me,
Back in the days of our QuArt collective,
About some friends of hers squatting there
In one of the upper floors, & how she thought that sounded
Like “the most amazing thing imaginable”
It took me a while to appreciate what she meant by that
And she may never have even told me that,
‘cause it becomes harder to tell strands of reality apart
From the bright strings of yarn of my own invention
(plus garlands of tinsel I find lying around)
with which I so assiduously weave them
The skatepark looked incredible
Like the portal to another, & better, reality
Where there are tons of punks & no pigs
& I imagined it expanded tenfold, a hundredfold,
A galaxyfold, to the size of Golden Gate Park
(after dark), & beyond—
swelling like the universe in the moments after the Big Something,
swallowing up hellfire & calamity & conformity in its implacably awesome maw,
leaving us with all the time in the world
& the most fabulous place imaginable to play,
for fucking ever.
Can you imagine that shit?
Let us not be so busy preparing for doomsday
That we neglect to tend
The bright gardens of our best (non)judgement
“Are there more cops than usual on the street today?”
I asked a streetscarred fellow on the sidewalk—
“About the same as normal,” he said,
Failing to confirm my paranoias.
He asked if I had any weed to sell
No, sorry, I said—he turned away in blank but expected disappointment—
“but I have some to give away,” I added, bringing him back
In surprise—things like this don’t happen as much these days
Or do they happen about as often as they always have?
“I want to make art again & not just talk about,”
I told Luke, having (almost really) made up my mind
to start again in Philly
Last night
we walked, my friend & I,
On Peacock Lane, & saw the lights
she made me a delicious mug of cocoa
With real love & style, it took ten minutes,
Adding a dollop of coconut oil in last,
& dousing us with lavender,
As we smoked a last chance bowl
—cause I go sober in two days!—
& ate the amazing fudge & peppermint bark & similar
Gourmet confections created by her multitalented mother
I told her about the friends at my last house
answering her questions, “why aren’t you still living there?”
With a plagiarized description from Kate Bornstein
About how he & I briefly united like a binary star system,
Only for our polarities to shift, expelling us
with white hot force
to opposite corners of the universe
How they tried to find work for me
as a floor installer
as a Vibrant Valley worker
as a sort of escort
(“you wanna dole out that cock?”)
None of this bothered me,
Any more than it excited me
“So what should I be?”
I asked one evening over those dinners he knew how to cook
He meditated a moment
“You should be a monk, Tony”
he finally said.