Poem: July 19, 2019

These Are Dangerous Times

And here we are back to Yeats
and his dreadful second coming,
the center being pulled despite
itself out to the fringes, flying
off the wheel, driven mad in
the cacophony, happy to find
just one side of the coin, just
one end of the knot to hold, and
of course, such noise fuels the
passionate intensity. We are all
the worst of us when none of us
can hold two opposing ideas
in our heads and imagine the
possibilities. To think that both
blue lives and black lives matter,
that love is love and God is love.
Does love matter, here, in this
moment when fear slithers and
constricts like a snake, or like
a blindfold, and spines go rigid,
and armies assemble around
the banners of words until they
are torn and scattered by the
great beast, the orange vortex,
the lord of lies. Until nothing
can matter because anything
that matters can be feared-
a police car emblazoned with
the stars and stripes in black
and white within the vigilante
skull of the punisher, a kid at
dusk, on foot, black hood up-
and any word can be made to
sound absurd or seem a threat-
social democrat, religious
freedom- when sneered into a
microphone, when chanted in a
crowd, and it's not like this
wasn't here all along, inside the
bottle, underneath the rugs, and
dripping through our history,
eating away the pipes. A lot of
things turn up in a storm, and
a lot of stuff gets broken or lost.