Wet and moonless, the Japanese maple drips her pigment
onto a desolate, metal halide-lit stretch of road, until
pink-red rivulets parade ostentatiously toward…
We are all mourners now, our clothes
funeral shrouds we tear off our backs
when the time comes (and it will come);
in one pocket we carry brushes for tidying
the graves we stumble on in schools, churches,
nightclubs, concerts, grocery stores, streetcorners…
long before the stamps commemorating peace,
before factories resumed churning out grenades,
some made off with blueprints for conquest,
taped them to the walls of their dreams
On a drizzly morning walk I stopped to let a hearse go by,
its pitch-black paint sweating polish, and as I waited
for the procession I thought about who profits from tragedy,
the business of loss, and who profits no matter what,
I hire the police that protect my home from the hordes
that would tax me: I need nothing from the State, and so
give nothing to the State.
One of the most pernicious attitudes about the nature of political leadership is that running a city, state, or even the whole nation is akin to being the CEO of a company, an attitude shared not only by free market-obsessed […]