Well Bottom Blues

YOU ARE TRAPPED IN THAT BRIGHT MOMENT
WHERE YOU LEARNED YOUR DOOM
— Samuel R. Delaney in City of a Thousand Suns

In Delaney’s novella trilogy Fall of the Towers the characters must confront the mass, simultaneous discovery by an entire society that a key assumption about their lives–that there was an enemy beyond the barrier; that they were at war–was a complex fiction constructed by their ruling class.

We are in the same position. The nation is convinced there is an enemy beyond The Wall. It is entirely fictitious, a creation of a state what wishes to impose an authoritarian vision on the United States, an utterly UN-American* notion that this is a nation only for white European Christians.

I was a political animal for decades: and anti-nuclear, anti-apartheid, briefly a young communist all through the 70s. Vecame a journalist inspired by the long history of word crusaders that culminated in my youth and Woodward and Bernstein. Workee for a while on Capitol Hill and then campaigns because I wanted to get in “the game.”  Fled Congress for the upper Midwest with my ex-wife from North Dakota looking for a quiet place to raise kids. Did some democratic party work while I was there, and manage to make the list of the Fargo 42, the names published in the paper from a leaked list that the state Republican party would not allow to be admitted to President George Bush’s event in Fargo.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the Federal Flood I return to my newspaper crusader roots online, and share the housing subcommittee of the Mid City Recovery Planning Group. Overtime I retreated more deeply into writing, starting a second popular blog and writing more and more poetry. I have dutifully marched in recent years for Black Lives, for Palestine, against the constant and growing erosion of the footings of this country in my city.

I’m a rotten politician which is why I didn’t stay on Capitol Hill for very long. A former project manager I could be an organizer but that collides with my congenital inability to schmooze. So I write, mostly poetry. I started this blog to chronicle my recovery from bipolar disorder and from the creative aphasia that shut me down from writing for seven years as a side effect of some necessary medication. I thought I would chronicle that as I helped chronicle the Federal Flood and New Orleans, but that collapsed. I didn’t have that journalistic drive anymore. Instead I had an insistent muse, strong as the Holy Ghost, driving me to write poetry.

Can a poet make a difference the way a journalist can? Probably not, but that is how I’m called once again to give witness as I did 20 years ago, just in a different form.  There are few outlets for politically theme poetry. so I think I’ll start posting it here,

As the violent dissolution of the world I grew up in continues, I will write my poetry In The same spirit Delaney’s graffiti tagged write the line above: in Old Testament prophetic protest, hoping to bring at least a few people to the light, to strike a small spark that might help but out a heinous king and his minions.