What if all this time, energy, and money were spent, not on the illusion of security, but rather on building a more just, prosperous, and beautiful democracy? I suppose that’s a dream better left to comic books and video games.
In Xinjiang, 7,000-miles
away, a morning sun, reflecting off the
glasses of early risers, the windshields
of commuters, is so bright as to redact
last night’s graffiti: Down with Xi.
After four years, it has come to this:
I fear that all I love will go to ruins,
and my little son is playing on the dunes.
I am a concerned citizen writing to ask that you immediately remove Louis DeJoy, the Postmaster General of the Postal Service, from the Board of Trustees of your esteemed nonprofit.
If politics is war, Republicans have historically waged it more ruthlessly, and more successfully, than Democrats and Independents
To be trapped in an era, this era,
is the poet’s nightmare and delight. O future
readers—if there will be readers—what will you make
of this? What shall I—what shall we—bequeath you?
The true traitor lacks not morals but moral imagination. I shall
no longer grant the premise that we must debate amidst the
rubble of a world the unimaginative have plundered—
Celebrating the birthday of a nonprofit you founded doesn’t have the same nostalgia-soaked feeling as your own birthday: rather than the bittersweet recollections of childhood, this celebration has the bracing feel of adulthood.
We adults know the future is bleak.
Have jobs, families, to-do lists.
Do what we can.
Know in our hearts that
It’s not enough.
I’m not going to argue the absurd, argue
That things are bad or going to get better.
We live in an age of immutable belief shaped