That Time of Year This Year

We come together in our time

Undifferentiated in our lies

Like so many blizzardy leaves 

Drifting, pouring over frosty lawns

We crowd those lies into surly lives

And wonder why we care enough,

To make the lies our lives, our hearts

Beg the question and turn our heads

Toward hope, living more than just doing,

Looking to the love in little ones pleading

But maybe we don’t care enough,

Should we care enough about the little ones?

Do we have the temerity to face hope’s

Uncertainty? We hang in the balance as

We walk the line and turn away, but the

Little ones, what about the little ones then?

So then we call out this special time of hearth

And home and family and friends and cheering

And that then yes the special time, you know, the

Time we forestall, smile awhile and make promises,

Yes even especially for the little ones, and to the

Little ones who look up at us with wondering eyes

Appealing, believing in their not knowing what

Else to feel, and then for us, what about the little ones?

Do we care enough this year, that time of year?

Do we care enough about anything, about ourselves?

It is that time of year again this year, can we care

Enough about the little ones, about ourselves?

The Trumpian Onanist Rallies

With the Boris breeze at his back, Trump will now shift to a weekly schedule of hiss rallies.  The avid lemmings of his proudly doleful precariate will be howling and braying their anthems to him, shivering in onanistic release as they bend the knee to his fiery masturbatory rhetoric. 

This is the same pathos that demagogues bring to all the nations who give up on the standards, norms and laws of their societies and governance.  The U.S. came close to this in the 30s (Father Coughlin, et al) and 50s (Belly Gunner Joe McCarthy and his HUAC), but we never actually bit the apple.  Maybe we had more guts back then.  We sure had enough guts to make the sacrifices and fight the battles of WW II. I don’t remember looking around to discover a loud mouth savior, snake oil salesman to provide for the solutions.  We didn’t seek the enervation of post-orgasmic thrill from the rants and whining of a man-child poseur.  We still had pride and shame, which cannot be found among the lemmings and their Pied Piper.

To my fellow citizens in the doleful precariate: You will have a bill to pay that you won’t be able to put on your plastic card.   The bill will be to cover all the costs your cheers and braying cover now.  And it will cover the loss of your independence.  That’s the truth that hides behind baseball caps and T-shirts.

Our essential existential crisis

Perhaps Harold Pinter is the lodestar of post-literate social communication.  In Pinter, everything that matters is contained in the unuttered and/or unutterable.  Our lives, especially now in this tenuous, anxious era, are repressed, or, like the contents of a propane tank, are highly energized, volatile thoughts and dreams compressed within us, moving us along, bumping us into things, dodging uncertainties.  We spend our energies avoiding what our fears propel us toward.  Utterance, after all, is attempted contact and response.  And, for the most part, we demur, until for matters of personal worth, we press the release valve, and the troubles manifest.

Yielding to the perceived necessity of not uttering leads to an existential crisis.  If we don’t respond to or don’t initiate utterance, we risk increasing the pent up energy already in the tank, so to speak.  If we do respond or initiate, we run the risk of judgmental and/or hostile reaction from the other(s).  In either case, we will then have become exposed, the release valve will have been triggered, and the slightest unintended spark could ignite the volatility leaked into the communal space.

In Pinter, as in other smart writing, we can experience this by “watching” as apparently innocuous utterance devolves into treacherous, demeaning conflict.  Or we can be mindful of what’s going on in our gatherings.  Perhaps our current sufferance within the spew of social media represents our resolution of this existential crisis.  Perhaps all current utterance is essentially an overwhelming released gas, a numbing pollution of our dissociative, solitary, disconsolate space bereft of any triggering and ignition.

Is it really any wonder that we have a gnawing sense of distrust among us?

A poem for ourselves

“a splendid virtue called disobedience” 

(Oriana Fallaci, from Letter to a Child Never Born)

actually, within its circumference, I might have chosen

noble, for that’s what it takes to bear its necessity, alone,

and never so much as in that instance, no decision, just a tic,

thoughtless, of course, but mattering so much more, a flash of

lightning striking, an energy of the cosmos marking deliverance.

placidly, in countervailing compensation, hope, like the child’s wistful

wishing, wide-eyed from under covers, silently thinking and not

speaking, reaches out into the stillness, and fades to pale yellow…and so

in each crucible of determination, like a bee hunting a hive spot,

difference hovers, against the wisdom and certitude of ages and sages.

What is there in obeisant allegiance?  filling orders, timing out the day in

an overseer’s drum beat, shining boots with your tongue, or hoping perhaps

somewhere the lightning will strike and wake us to be human.

For not to obey is to show the palm in the face of acceptance and calm.

It is not being nice and smiley-faced as bile surges into your mouth.

It is disrespect in the face of demeaning, shameless, mindless authority.

It is, perhaps, the most profound and useful virtue available to you.

An Old Man In Waking Dreams

Spring then too, always, the first truly balmy times,

Then off in solitary striding into discoveries, rocks, strange

Plants, stranger sounds, in solitary satisfaction, being whatever

I would like in the true learning, as it went on and continued

Spring even now, ancient really, and suddenly recall its stopping.

You plucked my I from me and crumpled it and matted it so

That it was heaved inside THEM, plausible, placid and regular.

And so now still then, in times, as the mind drifts even more and

Takes itself to places it forgot it knows with a flash so thoughtless it seems

A refreshment, an original, from a languid time, perhaps, or not, no

Matter, because this drift can become a mastery, a more than it can seem.

And as the drift wanders on some rocks and plants and sounds recollect,

Reconsider, even rejoice at the slightest glimmer, that time that the I had

Its dandiest something else, to wonder at, to wonder more—

But now

As then

Maybe I was THEM even then, on the meanderings

Among the lilacs, the dank, dirty banks along the canoeing creek,

Boulders mounting high along the endlines of the neighborhood,

Scaling support struts and splinters on outdoor advertisings,

In all that heroism alone I could not see

That I had been plucked early into all of it

All my time with all of THEM.