In a car accident, everything happens in slow motion. You see it coming and you can’t stop the outcome. As time slows, the anticipation of devastation and destruction intensifies. Adrenaline courses through your veins but it won’t help you escape your destiny. Sweaty, shaky, heart pounding, you know you’re losing control. The blood rushing to your brain brings a clarity that is terrifying.

Then it’s morning. You wake up bleary-eyed in a state of disbelief postmortem. You survived but your country is the casualty. For the first time in your life you sense what it must've been like for Native Americans. Disenfranchised, displaced, dismissed, attacked and invaded, unable to survive without the resources that belong to them.

This is America? Your ancestors tried to warn you but you succumbed to the veneer of material comfort, or the lack thereof, believing in the fantasy of the American Dream. Your so-called democracy was used against you, your media complicit. Never before have you witnessed the free fall as your institutions dismantled The Land of the Free.

All the DREAMers who must hide in the light of day and move from place to place to evade capture and deportation. If the behavior indicators of the TSA don’t spot them, sending money back home makes you a moving target. Impoverishment our new export. Child bearers will be denied care, contraception and abortion with the destruction of Planned Parenthood. Some forced to abandon their children in the streets. Married queers will live in dread fear of annulment and the resurgence of hate crimes against friends and family. Muslims will be profiled, discriminated against and accused of extremism as they're victimized by their xenophobic neighbors and their own community. Women must accept sexism and misogyny so evident in the outcome of this election as standard operating procedure. While the working class has been lulled into a state of amnesia about who and what is responsible for their poverty, all minorities, each and every one are sinking slowly in the quicksand of fascism, racism and hate with This Land is Our Land, the hue and cry of White Anglo Saxon America.

As with all great loss we suffer anger and grief, untethered and disoriented.  We live in fear of instability and uncertainty, acutely aware of our mortality. A citizen without a country is like a planet without gravity. We float unable to grab onto anything and look down over the dark abyss. How can we possibly lift ourselves out of a nightmare that never ends?  

Please, oh please, wake me up.

do you ever get the feeling that all is lost, that we're back pedaling
trying to reclaim it?

yesterday
we had an art life.
today we don’t want to own it.
we don’t want to own up to the fact that
we live to die,
die to live
each and every endangered moment.

ex-pats of indentured servitude
living life on the margins
undamaged,
wildly imaginative
desperate,
unconditionally free.

we, my love, are the
oxymorons
all that is you
and me.

down the road of wreckless dreams
running in place
after me, after you
running so hard i cannot see
the blinding light
brilliant
blameless
blazing like flames
burn in hell with me

the pounding, angry hell of wretched passion
a hell called love
a hell we cannot harness

surrender, i hear you think
surrender, i repeat
and in the repetition
i release the fear, the threat.

i look into those hazel eyes
the light ablaze
blameless
when you dynamite my hardened exterior
exposing all of me.

i want not
do not want what you give me
to think about
there are no consequences
no conclusions
the white, the black, the pattern
of love, the colors...
the longing
why do we forget?

the soprano down on 12th street unleashed the firestorm.

she sucked all the oxygen from the room

filled with despondent artists seeking redemption

from self denigration, despair, uncertainty and chaos.

you must look into her eyes, hold that gaze

and do not waver.

the turbulence unbearable,

the intensity, the burn

of years confessing all but love

that sat in an unopened box

waiting to be claimed.

we were fearless companions in the name of art,

excess and social justice.

oh but for the night of splendor when we touched

the hunger fathoms deep as if we would die of starvation

when our plates were full

the curtain of torrential rain

as the wind shear strengthened

fire whirls exploding, darting about

aimlessly.

compensation for obliteration

of all things known and unknown.

do not look back, do not turn around to see the carnage.

that is what we told ourselves

because it seemed we could not bear

the loss as we watched the dissolution,

as if we would lose everything,

lose it all.

our lives, our loves, our freedom, our history

as confidantes in a reckless and morally incomprehensible world.

we watched as it all burned up

and found

among the charred remains

the box.

Tracing the lines to Orly Airport
baggage gone missing
$200 in my pocket,
two months across the lonely continent.
So tell me, where does the time go?

Thirty years, another opus
stripped bare of non-essentials.
There are no fictions
only roads that lead to impasse.
Or the rotary so notorious
it circles endlessly,
the mind unyielding.

I am the architect of my dreams
I am floating, iridescent on the necklace
of the sea, the horizon
wavers in the distance
unconditional
without intention.
I am fearless
at the center
of truth.