Last Gleaming

I'm not much of a poet. And this is not so much a poem as it is a loosely-themed mess of a very-much-first-draft of something in serious need of edits and reworks to fix tonight's stream-of-consciousness dump. But, it's Election Eve and I feel the need to capture where my head is right now, so, for whatever it's worth...

And at some point
I lost count

No longer able to list, to name every march
Every protest
Every Sisyphean act of resistance
That dominated travel plans and filled my social calendar

Back when I still had those

A struggle to recall how many trips I’d made
Whether alone
Or with a team of friends infinitely
More prepared than I –

Prepared with snacks
Prepared with plans for what we’d do and who we’d call
And where we’d safely reconvene
If the shit went down
Prepared to fill the rental car with jokes
And songs
Not as much to pass the hours
As to counter the unyielding barrage
Of news stories read
In horror from my phone
Like a dystopian screenplay
Too farfetched
To be greenlit, unfolding before us
Now, a new reality fashioned
Out of whole cloth and
Alternative Facts -
The birth of a nation that registered
In the moment as shocking,
Unconscionable,
Unimaginable – but had, in truth, always been
Inevitable,
The natural outcome of our equation

At some point I couldn’t remember
The number
Of miles and milestones -
The highways stretching through history without
Promise of future, past Gettysburg
And Antietam
Drives through Pennsylvania to stand
On Pennsylvania
On Independence and Constitution
On principle
Huddling with the masses in winter’s inaugural winds and
Sweltering in Lafayette’s oppressive heat
Two years before it would see the heat become
Far more oppressive

Or back home, failing to quantify the midday walks
A few blocks over
To gather in a public square where
The public
Had long since stopped gathering -
Standing in the shadow of an edifice seemingly designed
With the sole purpose
Of reminding me that democracy wasn’t the only
Greek revival we’d
Made a half-assed attempt at
And trying not to notice that the crowd
Was measurably smaller than it was
Last week
And significantly larger than it would be
Next week
As outrage fatigue consumed more corporeal real estate,
The focus of our dissent more and more
Blurred,
Muddied by the sheer volume
Of subject matter,
Of reason for resistance and resistance of reason

So much easier than
You’d think
To lose track of which cause
We were marching for this time
Standing among a half million strangers
Or a half dozen neighbors
Not for lack of conviction, but because
We’d all lost count

Of the lies
Of the cons
The misdirection and obfuscation
The scandals and obstruction and collusion and coordination
Of the grifts
The emoluments
The atrocities committed in our names
Of the treason and power grabs and denigration of norms and absence of morals
Of the boasts and the insecurities
The gross incompetence
The fleecing and slander and broad daylight crime
Of the retrogression
The flaming racism
The violence
The death
And the kids
In
Goddamned
Cages

All of it
Constant and unforgiving
A firehose of barbarity

It was exhausting
It was overwhelming
It was the point

Designed to make it impossible to see the trees
For the forest -
Our capacities and attention spans,
Our bandwidth lacking,
Unable to hold focus and devote the time
And determination
Required to force accountability
Or even to keep tabs, until we’d grow so
Collectively numb
We’d forget it had ever been different

No memory of how many times I’d repeated the mantra:
“This is not normal,”
But not enough to make me
Fully believe it – since, look,
All due respect to Martin,
But the arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend
Like he thinks it does -
Left unfettered, its congenital state is and
Always has been
To buckle toward injustice with a planetary gravitation
So natural it can only be man-made -
Its bow only slowed with resistance
Applied firmly in the opposite direction by those
Without adequate power
To change its ultimate course, but a recurring
And Notorious willingness to make
Good trouble for those bent on
Preserving the system
And delay its progress a little longer

I lost count, too,
Of those who would ask why -
Questioning my drives across states
To stand in capitol crowds or
Local rallies that appeared fruitless,
Symbolic at best -
No obvious point or outcome or objective
For change -
And I would tell them that people
Need allies
And I was happy to be one -
Or that, selfishly, I needed to be in those crowds
To know that I wasn’t the only one
Who thought like me -
To feel less alone and more supportive
But still not hopeful
Never hopeful
That I’d ever see the nation become what
I wanted it to be

The main reason, though,
I most often kept to myself,
Not trusting in my interrogators’ ability to understand -
My reason for being there was
To be there -
To be counted among those who, knowing the boulder would always
Roll down on them in the end,
Pushed it anyway -
“Resistance,” I had read somewhere,
“Must be its own reward,
Since resistance, at least within the lifespan
Of the resistors,
Almost always fails”

This Great Experiment will not last forever
Our country – my country –
Will eventually fall -
Tonight, though, I’ll continue to stand
With those committed to delaying the twilight
A little longer
And hope that, in the early light of dawn,
It’s still there