“It’s easy,” he says. “Just wait.”

And so you wait. The lights,
the cars on the highway,
    —you think, it’s not shrill
or callus, it’s thunder, it’s

one-one-thousand
two-one-thousand
three, and

    "—that’s enough for an ending."

He says it’s easy—
    —you say it’s not
He says, “that’s nice.” So you—?

You say it’s specious. He says, “that’s better.”

“Illuminate—”

“(To be authentic is to forego creation. (
    i.e., creation implies contrivance...
))”

Stream of conscience. That’s what he meant.

§

“—too many concepts” He’s speaking now through the window. “It’s like a bullet; it’s my favorite simile. It’s shallow.”

one-one-thousand
two-one-thousand
three-one-thousand—

“But it’s not really a metaphor… you know?

§

"But you want—a story?"

A definition.

"A moral which explains the point and means enough to conflate life with holy-water, hand grenades, life, the blues—

An excuse:

    one, once.
    two, twice.
    three, thrice; then a semitone.

That’s what love is worth.”

§

“They call it—?
    verve”

“No, life is contained. This is the nature of cataclysm.”
No life is contained? This is the nature of cataclysm. If

    we  attempt some consummation, 
    we become cannibals,
we swallow the pedants and indulged academics (
    the ones “most offended” by indulgence
), is that—?

“Every poem ought to be revolting—
    truth? A lie constrained?”

[unintelligible] life is contained, so

one-one-thousand—

“Breath.”

two-two-thousand—

three-three-thousand &

suddenly you weep—
    the world is a dead mystery—

it’s

“Just like a poem.”

He flinches into the cold grass &
    you want to learn about compassion,
    you want to run headlong 
        into an overburdened dream;

but the sky has turned fanatic and you think
    it'll never rain again
    it'll never rain &
in the cold grass he turns to see and you look away—

he drowns in dew,
    his heart throbs,
    his voice—

you imagine you learn about compassion,
you imagine a whistle in the wind &
    the crack of midnight violence,
    daybreak buckles &

you break, imagine nothing else,
    just the bitter smell of lilac & rose & incarnation
        while he—

    he wraps himself in the cool and waits
        & waits—
    he hears the siren blast & 
sees out the far side
    where his worldlines are folded origami;

you fold your world into his meridian,
you fold your breath & 
    catch sight of the vipers &
    the bastards & 
        the lying dead prone on confetti-splattered pavement
    
heart proffered to the frozen god of a father who died
    so we never have to learn about—

I would like a simple life 
yet all night I am laying 
poems away in a long box. 
 
It is my immortality box, 
my lay-away plan, 
my coffin. 

        —Anne Sexton
 

I wrote this book, and it is sentimental 
Because I don’t have a right sized reaction to the world

	—Hera Lindsay Bird

This would be tomorrow any other day.

A moment, preemptive as nostalgia,  
tangible as watered-down citrus drinks— 
a moment drowned in missed translation & 
sensation as tenuous as our dance floor 
stained by wash lights and acid hope: 

As you negotiate the new year wrapped  
in your second-best dress, remaking  
torpor into second kisses, I'm downshifting  
ahead of the E Street exit in standby blue jeans,  
cultivating motion like over-smoked cigarettes. 

Later, the Circle will be exhausted, it will  
heave its saturation patrol mundane and you’ll 
explain its language with precision—you’ll never  
forgive me for refusing to understand but I’ll 
misremember and remember you eidetic. 

For now, I’m stranded near 20th and S, a  
tracing paper fantasy in this barely-my-city  
on the verge of event horizon—but you believe, 
you say it’s time to put our prophets to bed,  
to become diplomats and dream like drunks. 

We know what happens next: Walking back to your  
car we’ll meet a man missing a girlfriend and a  
labradoodle with whom we’ll trade rumors for  
jimsonweed and flee through the towns along  
the Potomac and survive like January romance— 

we’ll become inclined to digression & conspiracy
and too old to claim indifference, though naïve 
enough for these moments as acrid as the pharmacy  
and its shattered glass—these moments, 
rationed like falling stars at daybreak. 

Reflections (as in salt, as in the cracks in the sidewalk):

12/12 (Thursday) – Positivism is, without a lie, impossible. Negation without desire is dishonest. These are things I know.

11/20 (Friday) – Lies without meaning approximate truth. Desire without loss is nothing. These are things I know.

10/24 (Yesterday) – Time (i.e., being) is a normative claim.

Nothinginsomuch

My skin into sleet, 
My shivers into sacrilege— 
the black ice cuts me  
cross-sectioned, leaves  
the seconds trembling, 
paints me erudite:  
I sink myself into the  
pavement—I wash it away  
with whiskey. 

My emptiness into air, 
My breath into transition— 
dreams, then Capitol Hill at 
dawn, city bus broken down  
on the roundabout—I found  
a t-shirt in the snowbank, 
once worn by a mystic  
who got tired, so  
he grew up  
and became hard. 

Your star sign  
    into my viewless evening, 
My shadow  
    into your paper-mache winter 
when we sat lieless, hands 
folded into simile like
paper cups and burnt coffee— 
you, the silence of my morning,  
and I, pollyanna-inert, 
sharing a last stand between  
tomorrow and careless  
innuendo. 

A Soft Ending: When you finish reading and close your eyes, what is left of the character you barely met? Recall Ursa Major, recall the cruel mercy of her insecure god.

And the laurel, too—stalked by Star-hearted Apollo.

Like chicken pox or poison oak.

My birds find the dark
imposing—it’s not properly
abstract. You know how it is
when we feel excessively real—

or entirely present. They sing 

strange polygons, into and  
out like pretense  
woven through a plunging sky, 
dislocated parallaxis, cold and 
somewhat unlike storm gods. 

This is how I kill my time in our  
suburb-persistent cul-de-sac: 

I think I remember  
you were going to steal a Camaro,
a convertible, transmogrified green &
we’d name her something like Shameless Reality
and she’d hold 115mph through Middle America
'til we hit the Rockies where the plunging sky
becomes dry land.

They say it’s different when you die out west. 

~But~

my birds will never drown, they 
only shudder—they become the  
last moment to survive my windowsill

the last moment 
into frantic
dawn,

muted,
itinerant,
utterly enthralled by  
unburdened second chance.

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“This would be tomorrow any other day” first appeared in the Red Ogre Review.

“Nothinginsomuch” and “Like chicken pox or poison oak” first appeared in The Word's Faire.

I
We start with a car lot,
burned down because the fire alarm had been 
     disconnected to save money
     so the manager could pocket the difference &

misuse irony then
retire into the silence of sand and shade and sea & 
    other things reluctant to mean more 
than the waterlogged ledgers & 
their stories that teach us nightmares
and give us a sense that we could 
    get away with 
    murder 

if only we pour the gasoline

just so.

II
Imagine we sit far between intersections—
    just to the left of the setting sky 
fading through shades 
    of viridian then violet &
into the cyan of a city along the shore of a lake so static 
    every sound hits like a bus filled with ambition, 
like a tourniquet 
soaked in 
    the salty sweet of a fever dream—

i.e., the idea behind the tragedy.

Imagine ripples and reflections
    like a broken TV 
playing the last scene of a movie you’ve 
    never seen and it’s terrifying because 
        you know no one dies 

    —they just linger until the sequel 
where they linger again & 
become less than a voice
    speaking in the timber of 
first-person accidental.

III
Should I break the fourth wall?

—you wouldn’t listen, you wouldn’t believe me if 
I told you I’m not partial to streams of thought 
that die and wallow, caught in sensations that 
taught life how to live & 
how to breathe and believe and leave you
    groping for a plot, an overture—anything that won’t 
have you grasping at meaning measured in 
micrograms by a man compulsively correcting you 
when you say you don’t know, 
but really, you know—

I would never tell you how to read a poem.

IV
The car lot burned down.

The Everything went wrong.

There was nothing left to leverage; 
so the owner’s son dropped out of college &
got a respectable job—
    he’d learned to be a bricklayer &
    later a lineman who climbed
an electric pole and fell &
    after the funeral his wife finds a manuscript,
a novel where the main character and narrator share 
a name and an elevator 
    down to a postmodern hell 
filled with antimodernist 
        impressionist sculptures made of 
concrete meaning, 
    which they bash to pieces

after declaring their sins by dying 
and leaving journals
for their wives or lovers or au pairs
to find and read, edit and publish 
    and finally wonder why the neighbors 
   don’t come around much anymore.


V
Another thing was that the
claims adjuster had been 
drunk when he wrote his report; 

he’d exonerated the cleaning crew.

Which was fair
but it got him fired because 
he’d preempted a lawsuit meant to provide
bonuses to the shareholders & 
secretaries who keep the system intact
as it atrophies and dollars are packed in the cracks
        —inefficient, yes, but that’s not the point;
    the point’s a counterfactual where

a young man (really) reads Marx &
reads like a saint; he comes away with the insight that
capital is murder, but that also becomes not the point;
so he comes away exhausted and wheezing & 
wondering what are his options—other than give up on long weekends
and summers at the beach and become

some stoic who thinks 
    he feels nothing as he
he sits stoned, faces down
    sales seminars and pep talks
    from life coaches who don’t 
    notice that he never really learned 
what it’s like to tell a lie.

VI
In the end there’d be another funeral
with sandwiches cut in quarters &
daiquiris with an overbaked cousin telling stories
about the ends of wars too remote to remember, 
the battles so secret 
they’re recorded in flavors of Pynchon or Wallace
or Emerson and Thoreau doing shots of tequila while
sorority girls watch and wonder if university 
was a waste of money, or if they should become hypnotists 
who recall Atlantis like a practical miracle &
articulate absolute motion like a

whirl-o-wheel rusted after
too many generations of material fanatics
took too much and demanded too little.

VII
Car lots are like leech fields that have run dry.
Car lots are like broken topsoil when the wind
blows east-west and piles into anomalies 
which cause poems and mythologies
and other sentimental cataclysms as we go
drifting from interstate to interstate,
surface street to side road, then along the 
drag along the shore of a lake in a world 
like a planetarium in disrepair.

VIII
But I would never tell you how to read your poem—

    after all, I don’t feel your lips or the tension
    behind your eyes or the rhymes that prove 

your beginning is gone:
    this is the concept of a used car lot that lived 
    too long. This is the fire & 
    the consequence &

the half-remembered sunsets drifting left to right
    across the plane of a galaxy with stars that
    live and die along spectral lines, the signified mechanics 

of half-lives and afterlives of the ledgers 
that intrude on the conscience of a poet 
    well versed in the flash points of ordinary
    hydrocarbons.

Art has abandoned us—we don't love,
    we fuck like corpses and claim it's revival like 
        botulism in the eyes 
        of a rich man who can't

decide if he wants to die or transcend or suffer & 
    lie collapsed on the pavement & 
        bleed through the moment
        & bleed into society, 
            as social as a shooter whose future 
            is stuttered &
    poetic and authentic like a mood 
expressed & proved & tested by peers 
    who hear the
    fear and cringe 

because it's all just a little 
too “sentimental”.

O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
      Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light,
      Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
      In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the "Amen," ere thy poppy throws
      Around my bed its lulling charities.
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,—
      Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
      Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.

To take up the simile of sleep as death (or its corollary) is to confront a strange intersection, for sleep and death are of a kind. The metaphor is manifest: how deep does our embalming go? Perhaps even this is a superfluous question. As we are lulled to sleep, we allow ourselves to dissolve. We are pulled into sleep, first by desire, then by need. Is insomnia not a greater curse? It is akin to medieval torture—when sleep is too long delayed, the daylight is abomination and terror. Blake protests when night has eluded him: “Light doth seize my brain with frantic pain.” We know that once the sun breaches the east, he can only turn west and imagine the deep dark.

Blake may be doomed, but Keats still sings to us. Our “gloom-pleas’d eyes” close, “embower’d from the light,” and we are enraptured in a hymn that demands nothing of us except our entire being. We may admit that it is not a fair trade, yet we are still happy to lend ourselves to oblivion. This is the only resolution and respite we know: Our “lulling charities” are narcotic; when sleep has us, the past day cannot breed our woes. Our “curious conscience” digs into the remnants of the day just passed, but in sleep—true and deep sleep—we are taken below the reach of heavy memories. If every misdeed revisits us in the dark, it is sleep that drives our bad conscience into remission; deep sleep is the only thing that terrifies the dark, for it denies fear access to our hearts.

Every goodnight is a form of goodbye. After all, isn’t the passing of fear also the passing of life? We see so clearly that life is anxiety, frisson; we react and scamper and become vital forces. If we are to have agency, if we are to push back against the void, we must concede to exhaustion. At the end of motion we find, of all life’s pleasures, deep sleep is the most sublime. The abyss accepts us as we are; the abyss is final, and final means whole. So Keats implores the subtle night, “seal the hushèd casket of my soul.”

What could be more noble than to stand before one’s corpse and wish it well?

Exposition. The world is a confessional without a priest, a metaphor that feels out of place. If we trace our history through the moments when we had something to say, we would soon find ourselves at a loss for words—for words are encapsulated loss, an emulated motion that refuses to stick. What, then, of the world that began with a word?

Imagine this: You stand at the foot of Olympus Mons. You look up, the sky is stubbornly familiar: this is the edge of Western civilization. You are like a poet. Perhaps, like Rimbaud. Perhaps you’ve learned how to be a barbarian, a sexton tending to a dying compass. Your savage gods anoint you as Shelley’s rhapsodist—unencumbered by eternity.

Imagine you’ve exceeded your corpse.

Some thoughts on politics.

People still think Nietzsche was a Nazi.

Which is, of course, absurd because he was
the Unabomber if the Unabomber was a 
real poet who      almost never   wrote poems, 
like a monk taking alms 
while his last illumination rots 
at the bottom of a well while

the cold and the snow turn the color of patriots
blown to smithereens by the creeping irony 
they thought was dead. They thought, ‘irony's 
a concept & concepts are dead—like the night 
the American Revolution was canceled because 
the wind and the rain blew out the transformer.’

Time is another dead concept.

It's why we’re alone, it's why headstones 
become just stones, it's why we burn 
books in piles reminiscent of Olympus 
    or Sinai after the cleanup

crew comes to take away our 
commandments & anachronisms & 
our obituaries bleeding ink like manifestos 
bleeding wine.

For naught but a moment.

§—

⌠ I suspect there's a 
    lie at the center 
    of every love affair—
⌡ if such a thing exists.

Can you imagine need without 
    desire?
Desire without conflagration?

Can you imagine a lifetime            inside
                                                  a landmine? 

§—

... —you understand (sic), the war’s simply 

anguished indulgence,
    a kinetic fetish; the 
            bombs and guns and broken bodies 
    —spasms of clinical significance.

(i.e. The transactional enumeration 
of despair ad infinitum.)

§—

Tangentially related: To exist as engendered being is to exist beyond substance, to exist as an embodied metaphor—it is to have knowledge of the atom bomb:

sit(uation) rep(ort)s:
    dry
dry
   dry
like fiction,
    mythology,
        exculpatory contradiction (like 
real time (captured 
                        in transition)),

a temporal affliction,
            neuropathy
like a firebird, like (ashes ashes)

we all
    fell down.

Things we should have known. Poetry is an artform in perpetual regress. If it were ever secure in its meaning it would become undone along with the illusion of meaning itself. Does that make you sad? “Of course not,” I can hear you say, “the metaphor is too opaque, too cerebral, too much like a professor hopped up on coke and mescaline as if he’d stepped directly into his mid-twenties from the burnt pages of a burnt copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe.” I might not ask you what you mean. Your face probably says everything. Still, I’m sorry about the book.

In any case, I know that to you I’m disembodied. I’m already an anachronism—already too much. So, let me try again: Should it make you sad? Consider the liquified caterpillar wrapped in her chrysalis. Consider her an allegory for the simile ‘like a dipole moment’. Her life as a caterpillar is over—pupa is her in between. But she only becomes what she was, she emerges from her own flesh. She becomes beautiful by an act of self-consumption. This is the force of nature. This is like the part of us that’s like dipole moments. This is why butterflies are pretty.

The World as Imposition

For what it's worth, chrysalis has always been
inconsistently beautiful, a redundant becoming
yielding to a universe of gesture and implication,
an end to a means—pointless only to the point
of inevitable; profound as a matter of imagery.

In this spirit we consume our creators—those
obstinate corpses bereft of their ancient finery,
forgotten for what they once were or remembered
for what they failed to be. It's a shame they
had the faith to abandon unfortunate meaning 

so we could linger in their halls, wounded by the
atrocity of being—the stop and start of a sensation
that eludes us: Theseus and his ship were always 
doomed. Sisyphus, undone in his moment of imagination, 
finally offers up his liver to the crow.

But, it’s still a dream, an incidental reality,
a nothing-at-all content to exist as much as
its passion allows—our history traced in circles
from marrow to bone to flesh—our metamorphosis,
the apostasy of birth.

Redactions. I learned to sleep when my emotional dipole collapsed. That’s how I learned how not to sleep. Now I can’t quite sleep enough. Do you remember when I said, “poetry is an artform in perpetual regress?” I really meant it. Just like I meant for you to picture yourself suffocating as Olympus Mons looms so tall you don’t notice it’s there. That’s like the death of Western Civilization.

But Shelley and Emerson, Plath and Ginsberg and even my own poems will continue to mean something because that’s the only thing they can do. The poet is a façade atop a tempest creating shadows of poems that can never be undone. This is the mirage created by a civilization’s anxiety. It’s the same reason the butterfly is pretty.

Perhaps we should have only our caricatures, the ones we had drawn at the end of a pier on a lake. Imagine there’s a paddle boat docked, and its steam is fake because it’s got an electric motor. For a moment everything’s quiet. Someone you love stands behind an artist who draws you exactly like you want. Then the moment is over. The paddle boat and its electric motor have gone, and you’re left holding an exaggerated picture of your exaggerated self. Imagine this lake and you and an artist you love at the foot of Olympus Mons and imagine the stubborn sky.

Imagine you’re sad, because sad feels good at ~0.38G.

Hera Lindsay Bird identifies the root of the problem: “People don’t want to hear poetry, they want to hear people talk about poetry.” The literature is no longer the thing, but instead it is the subject; it is no longer a “meadow in which to burn yourself alive,” but a process—a practice in forensics. The whole enterprise becomes an effort to strip the canon of its natural tautologies and replace them with a system. The writer, whether she is the dead precursor or the living ephebe, is consequently frozen out of the realization of the act of writing. She is no longer permitted to define her own ontology; oftentimes she doesn’t even know that she’s allowed to. Sam Kriss says a better literature “would take a genuine interest in other people, other eras and other ways of being.” But even this goes too far; it is too prescriptive—a recipe for indigestion. It is not enough to declare the difficulty of saying what writing ought to do; we must recognize that the attempt should not be made in the first place. For the reader, to do so is perhaps a venial sin, but for the writer, uttering a prescription is fatal. The writer must never write for other writers as readers, for writers are the most dishonest of all readers.

When writers write for other writers—not as readers but as writers—it’s a love letter, and so it is honest. But we must also remember that in the love letter, the word ‘love’ is used in the loosest sense; if the term ‘infatuation’ were wieldier there would be no love letters. Love, it can be said, is a quiet embrace of that which is; but to be infatuated is to crave that which is desired. This is doubly true for the strong writer—for to be a strong writer is to be shamelessly autoerotic. Kriss rightly observes that inspired writing expands “into the large and sensuous world,” with all its contradictions and ironies. His only error is to misunderstand the scope of the possible, to assume the writer must reach into some “outside,” lest she be incurious. Truly, there are no confines to be exceeded, nor is there a ‘now’ to be addressed or a self to be assessed. The strong writer has nothing to be curious about except her impulse to write; that is to say, her Muse. Her inner and her outer worlds will inevitably be consumed by the same unsounding deep.

Whether Bloom and Barthes make strange (or hostile) bedfellows is a question for another time. For now, we must only understand that the remedy for artistic anxiety is the same: the abdication of the artist as meaning-maker. In the case of the former, the living artist must concede an abdication of meaning upon death. The latter takes the abdication as a foregone conclusion, part and parcel of the process of releasing the work into the world. In other words, Bloom and Barthes only differ on the timing and manner of the artist’s abdication. But we can take things a step further, for it is clear to us that art itself is a form of abdication—art is a surrender to the immutable aspirations of meaning, an illusory anchor suspended in indeterminate time. The artist’s abdication is the same as that of a king; it is the abdication of authority and of power. This is why there have been no poet-kings. This is how we know that Solomon’s songs are pseudepigrapha.

According to one incarnation of Nietzsche (for he reincarnates as a matter of course), “All poets and writers who are in love with the superlative want more than they are capable of.” Surely Nietzsche felt this in his bones, for who could deny that his very marrow was constituted of poetry? Yet he still errs, for while the simple writer need not be enthralled to the superlative, the poet’s talent—her curse—is to be overwhelmed by the possibilities and profundities that lie between her words. Her superlatives are her natural anxieties; they are her interminable pull towards a neurotic sentimentality. More than any other artist, the poet must live the lie of passion; she must dance with the vampire of her talents. Her exhaustion must come at the expense of her truth. We may reconfigure Nietzsche and say that, in the case of the poet, being beholden to her superlatives, she needs more than she is capable of. Indeed, we must go further still, for in seeking to immortalize her truth, she demands more than her liminal world can handle.

Anyway, with that out of my system—some of you may have seen that I’ll be releasing “News for a Pharaoh” on the 7th, which is this Saturday. Going forward, I’m aiming to publish shorter pieces more regularly, along with updates on what’s ahead.

In that spirit, after “News for a Pharaoh,” I’ll be working on finishing a piece that reflects on what it means to be a strong poet. I don’t know if that will be the next major piece to drop, but for now it’s the most immediate thing in the pipeline.

I look forward to seeing you all Saturday!

1. It was supposed to be the storm of the century. Nobody actually said that, but you know how minds are—minds and moments, etc. It’s twenty-four degrees Fahrenheit because I live in America and in a suburb, which is a place like any other. It’s a world, accidental minds and moments—an homage to a dead storm god. A suburb’s got a memory like a small town where the courthouse burned down so they built a new one that also didn’t survive the millennium. The suburbs are where past learned to be prologue. Now that it’s cold, time is my suspended epigenesis, my obsession—my tautological indifference. A suburb: three centuries of history, changing slowly until I arrive to live in past tense. It was supposed to be the storm of the century.

2. I’m an American, which means I’m supposed to be a pragmatic individualist without an ego. I was supposed to read Nietzsche in my early twenties and come to my senses by thirty. And I did, in a sense: I didn’t write so much I’d remember. I didn’t remember to read. I stopped doing drugs.

A STORY.

‘Yasser Arafat is a bad man.’ Once, this was a necessary truth. There are no unnecessary truths.

For the sake of argument, let’s say I’m nineteen and talking to an old man on an old man scooter (red). We’re at an intersection (it prefers we don’t cross). Let’s say we’re in Florida. One of the sensible cities—like Orlando, Ocala, or Saint Petersburg. It’s right after a gentle shower, but I don’t know what petrichor means.

‘Fine, but we all have to believe in something.’ The sun squints and stares at me through a puddle. The old man stares too. I hope he doesn’t understand what I mean. He believes in America, but only like a registered trademark. I believe in that too except I’m skeptical of authority, so they kicked me out of the Army. I’m certainly not going to tell the old man that. We have rapport. I like it.

‘Well, you’ll grow out of it.’

3. I want to write a proper essay, that way you’ll know I’m serious. I want to sing for the nihilist on the Metro and the realist suspended over surface streets (in a different city). One day I’ll talk the latter off his ledge and he’ll leave a toxic relationship and trade some baggage for a child. But that isn’t enough for me, just like it’s not enough to sit in the confessional and in silence. That’s why I want to write an essay; I want to say what’s already been said, dress it up like a doll I’ve never played with. I write poems to grapple with feelings I’ll never have. A proper essay would change everything. A proper essay proves epistemology.

4. On Chopin. A cliché wouldn’t be a cliché if it didn’t mean a lot. Cliché is only a sensation we’re tired of having. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, only that nobody wants to listen and so the older we get the more it aches. That’s a cliché.

I know what petrichor means. Now I know the sensation of the sun as it sets over the Blueridge Mountains, its breeze wanders the uneven terrain between myself and the closest peak. It’s the sensation of Nocturne No. 1, remembered just as No. 2 crescendos then trills. No. 3 reminds me of a last date that never ends. It was the first time I said I wanted to be a poet; it was the first time I wanted to explain. Later I would promise to never be sentimental.

But that’s not how Chopin works.

Chopin is like comedy, only taken seriously by the writers of proper essays. The rest of us, if we listen, we can hear him. He never strays far from a disarticulated arpeggio, or a moment drawn out just long enough to make us feel as suspended as a realist who has discovered that real-time is too broken to trust.

5. Petrichor. I finally understood petrichor this morning. The cat—the black one—was scratching at me through the blanket. The other had jumped onto the windowsill and for a second I could see the snow. It’s come earlier and thicker this year, I think. Later, after I stand up, I notice that all the houses have turned into steeples. I realize the weather and minds and moments mean the same as they did before. Meaning: few things are less themselves than the rumors you tell yourself because you get old and it snows while your spouse or partner or significant other is downstairs talking to a psychiatrist on the telephone. That’s petrichor.

6. It was supposed to be the storm of the century.

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No greater proof of this axiom exists than the anemic liberalism of the American Democrat. How can we not despair when we witness again and again his preference for the shameless status quo? Are we to accept his vapid paternalism and so set aside our dignity? It is easy to see that the Democrat is bereft of conscience; he cannot defend the integrity of the body politic. He claims to speak for us, while he mutes our voice and courts tyrants. It is no surprise that he does not inspire faith or tenacity. After all, how can he advance that which he does not possess himself? The fatal paradox of the Democrat lies in his instinct to claim our truths while rejecting the need for resolution. He operates on axioms that contradict his own inclinations; he proclaims that “all men are created equal,” yet barters away our rights and health in the name of pragmatism. It seems clear: the paternalism of the Democrat is as much a blight on our body politic as the delirious ramblings of his Republican compatriot.

By what authority does the Democrat claim the right to our voice? Simply put, he sees himself as the guardian of good order. He imagines himself to possess uniquely good judgement. And for him this is a solemn burden. Change, he insists, will happen in its own time and in the proper increments. But he goes further, for in his mind any change that cannot be deferred cannot be justified. From his high seat, he cannot understand urgency, for he himself has never felt it. He fears vitality because it lays bare his banal complicities. See how he debases himself and seeks friendship with the tyrant! How he plays apologist for the same barbaric agenda! The terror of this world is the product of this unholy collaboration.

Is it any surprise, then, that his laws and processes are chiefly designed to protect thieves and petty tyrants; that he is hostile to the protestor and the activist? The Democrat’s sickness is not simply rank hubris, for he has misused his platform—our voices—with knowing malice. He cheers himself for victories in which he played no part. He claims to be obliged to us but lays us low with his derision, for he believes only in his good judgement. It is not enough for him to demur; he must undermine and throw derision upon any who would contradict his wisdom. The progressive, the socialist, and even the other liberals know his righteous indignation. It could not be clearer that his cause is not our cause. The Democrat, through word and deed, insists that we will be deserving of his limited beneficence only when we accede to his erudite judgements. We must accept his wisdom of stasis.

Even with the best intentions, his limited language cannot speak to the pain and passion of a lived experience. His voice is dried up; his actions are the blind groping of a fool seeking power. His philosophy cannot manifest compassion because, beneath his saccharine smile, is an insidious ideology. In the end the best the Democrat can muster is limited and contingent beneficence. What has come of it? Our families have been inspired into the arms of tyrants and turned against us; our mothers, daughters, and sisters stripped of essential rights. Our friends, who the Democrat claims to protect, are having their very identities abolished. These and other tragedies are the Democrat’s legacy. He would have us believe that these are our failures, and so he steals our voice to advocate for his own petty self-interest.

We must now deny the Democrat the use of our voice. We can no longer afford his self-aggrandizement. It is not in our nature to allow cowards and misanthropes to barter away our dignity, health, and identities so that another might feel more secure in righteousness. We owe the Democrat nothing. After all, our voices were never his to take in the first place. We must no longer ask for change. The time has come to shout down this rotted system. The Democrat is a tool of tyrants. He has not only betrayed our trust, but he has denied our right to dignity. It falls to us to fill the streets and send a single message to the cowards who permit tyrants in the name of good order:

It is enough.

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I must say it clearly, these people are despicable. It is not simply that they do not care: they have contempt.

And now it falls to us to hold the line. We are the ones who have to say, “this far and no further.” It’s not meant to be easy.

We do have the past. We know the fight, and we know the stakes. With or without the advantage, surrender has never been an option. But this is not simply a fight against the tyrant and the capitalist. Our resistance is productive, for we fight for our friends, our families—and our dignity. The security of these most basic rights must not be infringed upon. If there is anything sacrosanct in this world, anything utterly non-negotiable, it is our right to prosper and to witness the prosperity of others.

But prosperity for one must not be bought with the dignity of another. We do not begrudge a friend for their success. I feel comfortable saying most of us are enriched when we see a friend achieve, even when they surpass our own successes. But every so often a friend succeeds and becomes insufferable. Very, very few of us, in fact, have not been that friend for a time.

Yet we can no longer overlook and excuse their abuses. Only in the unhealthiest of relationships do we allow our friends to become malignant and despicable. Our present moment is no different. I propose that our present moment is not metaphorically similar, but it is fully identical. However horrific his actions, no matter how dangerous he is, the tyrant is no more and no less, than we and our friends in different skin. And just as our friends’ misbehavior compels us to mitigate the harm they would do, our response today must reflect the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Keeping these boundaries is difficult—but they must be kept.

None of us know what our specific burdens will be. History gives us hints, and we may yet exceed history. In many ways, our objective is simple: we only need to say, “no we won’t” once more than they say, “yes you will.” As I said, it is not in our nature to acquiesce, for the price of acquiescence is far steeper than we are willing to pay. If our wayward friends do not hear our demands, we must make them hear. If they do not listen, we will make them. We must no longer sacrifice dignity and health for the hollow pride mere men. We have paid for their success for too long.

It is enough.

The corporate executive's lonely death and his friends' ambivalence only demonstrate the already apparent: the system is transactional to an absurd degree. Nobody really believes in anything. There are few people willing to take tyranny on faith. Even the people who buy in, on some level, know they're being lied to, or are simply unequipped to rationally contend with the real world.

The latter group only presents a political complication, for the psychologically dispossessed do not represent political agents; they represent humanity pushed to some extreme. These are the most deserving of compassion. To put it plainly, to varying degrees, those who struggle to identify reality struggle with a pathology.

The first group, however, can be negotiated with to differing degrees with various methods. For instance, there are the purely transactional: people so absorbed in accumulation they barely acknowledge their own humanity. Their friends step over their convulsing body for a convulsing body is no longer a useful body.

But we shouldn't see all who buy in through the same lens. Not all those who become complicit in the atrocities of a system are voluntary nihilists. We owe these people this grace: they believe out of fear. It is on us to break through that fear. Not to assuage it, but rather to force the confrontation that turns terror into mere fear. It is only by breaking through the fears of our peers and loved ones and friends that we can mainstream the revolution.

The world that we imagine is so dependent on compassion. The world we want to create is, indeed, built on that foundation. But to have compassion does not mean we acquiesce, it does not mean that we sacrifice our right to dignity—for these would be morally indefensible positions.

We have a moment and we must seize it. But this is not a moment of sudden breakthrough, this is a moment in which we can select from our possible futures. We must show those to whom we have obligations that they are worthy of dignity and that a world built upon that principle is possible. And we must show them the visceral truth: dignity is impossible in the current paradigm, for this paradigm demands that you step over the bodies of your friends so that you can get to work on time.