the clampdown

Comes a time the times are the trouble. Comes a day that there’s not so much a choice as the countdown of some suspect package, left all wires and spinning digits, waiting to unleash some unknown quantity as the minutes peel away. Burning cars and shooting stars, the professional goons and their rabid compliments of evil nitwits and other craven unfuckables upon the streets making their untested claims. Always en masse upon a peaceful protester or hapless straggler to poison or pummel as they may, it occurs that they aren’t expecting to be met with resistance, certainty not prepared for ordinance or an incoming nature. It’s the sort of hubris that has burned many a greasy bones cracked black. For every fool, an errand.

No words to mull, no love to mourn, no wished for woman or poem with a bad alternator dying in the drive. The de facto foreign op idiot crime boss racist in chief has declared war on America, grossly mistaking the mettle of the poor and downtrodden, and the wisdom of his shit stain master. Things will burn and centrists will urge the ballot box as bullets riddle our children and gloating villains prate and bleat. Folks like me will rail and fume and be removed in quiet lapses or tragic crimes. Me? There’s nothing left of me that’ll leave much of a mark. I guess I’m just a pair of cheap shoes looking for the right machine. Until then I’ll roll around in these words a little longer.

Still I work the increments. I am wide awake at the bottom of the well. The blue flame, the black candle. The older of the elder goats, a song about the alphabet, the mountain always on the way. The work of awakening is a tall order in the late game, the shift of senses and the limits of the animal. It’s in the way we draw our lines, and the way we hold them once they’re dear. This bewitched bandwidth, the static at the border and the bead on the seam. We speak as one from well worn ways, the absence of justice forever bereft of peace. Our hearts ablaze with fiery wings, our hands heavy and as matchless as the moon. The breath our inheritance as we sing out in Guthrie country. The rescued message in a bottle opens as a djinni.