Sensing My Dismay at the Election Results, My Wife’s Dog Presses Against Me
And when I roll over, my toe finds a hole in the not
inexpensive 400 thread count percale sheet and rips
down its length, and I wonder if I should extend this
metaphor to include walls and the unbearable weight
of societal collapse, or hatred with small hands and
minds or faces like pale disks of whitewashed emptiness
glaring at my friends, or, well, my wife and me, across
the restaurant’s laminate booths or the potholed street
by the bus stop. I recall the woman’s sneer and hushed
commentary that afternoon, and though I wanted to
correct her mistaken assumption (hey, lady, I’m not
Hispanic) and redirect her bigotry to the correct ethnicity,
I chose instead to smile and wave goodbye, to drive to
the polls and cast my ballot, one drop in that dark bucket
of nothingness, floating alone, perhaps to coalesce with
others and attain some sense of parity and belonging,
or to remain outcast, bewildered, wondering how this
could be, what’s happened to us, my home, our country.
* * *
This first appeared on the blog in November 2016.
2016??!! What is this world we live in? Anger shock outrage etc haven’t had any result Pollyanna says be kind, be loving – what does she know. Hopefully the Huge Play has a Huge Playwright…..
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I have to hope that the tide is turning, but I suppose we’ll see.
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Hope you’re right. There are a number of separate worlds with little connection – crazy conspiracy world aka Trumpworld, the so called rational world, then there’s poet world which connects everything and nothing….
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It will be interesting to look back about five years from now.
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“…and redirect her bigotry to the correct ethnicity”. Oh, this…😔
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Bigotry is so wasteful! And blind to reality…
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Indeed 😕💕
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That line struck me as well.
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Life is full of these absurdities. I find it easier to laugh at those affecting me directly, than those affecting others.
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I know what you mean.
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Uncanny timing.
Just spent a teeth-clenched week with ultra white in laws who own everything but books and on whom this pellucid piece would be lost.
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Ouch, Dan! That’s a particular Hellscape I hope to avoid.
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My tears after that day are still falling…(K)
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So much damage!
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And more to come I fear.
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What will rise from the ruins?
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That was very well – expressed!
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Thank you very much, Pamela.
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Ah, Bob: So clearly and aptly spoken, though I wish it felt more outdated than it does.
This gave me a smile: “… and redirect her bigotry to the correct ethnicity.”
Some 25 years ago, my clearly white like me (and blond) girlfriend and I were walking down a street hand in hand, when, from a passing car, came the heckle of a bigot who could not quite muster the proper epithet in the passing moment: “Ni**********ss!”
We looked at each other and broke up laughing. It still makes me laugh, and thankfully, that kind of experience DOES feel outdated.
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It’s the kind of event that still makes me want to both laugh and vomit. Hatred is the currency in so much of this country.
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Wow, this is really something. I love it and it makes me feel really uncomfortable (as in, good job!!!!!).
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Thanks, PJ! These are certainly weird and interesting times. By the way, the poem you sponsored last September was recently published: https://thirdwednesdaymagazine.org/2022/08/12/we-do-what-we-must-robert-okaji/
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Nice!!!! It’s so good to *feel* I have a poem without having to do any work to get it, lol!!!!! Glee!
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Ha! Well, it wouldn’t exist without you!
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Every day since that dark November of 2016, I’ve asked myself the question posed by the last two lines of your poem. More and more, I fear the answer.
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I like to think that common sense will win out, but the quest for power seems to trump (ha) all.
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I lost my faith in right reason and good sense prevailing back in 2016.
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I’m struggling to recover it.
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I’ll recover mine when/if I see empirical evidence .
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Clearly things are worse now than in 2016 … incremental demise … yikes!
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I fear that we are teetering on that precipice. Scary.
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