Now I’m older and feel a hurt long hatching
We were young and owned the world
Shame grows bolder, but still hides, latched in
my heart my gut, there where I would unfurl
The good yet latent in my soul
I’ve a wound, a hurt, a hole
Deep down — I’ve found.

Could please you contest evil strands
Of human passion wrapped in false light?
Could you please tell your friends to stand
Against Trump, against the lie that might makes right?
Could please y’all believe in us enough
To choose reality over this sticky fluff
That reduces “true” and “false”
To weapons, and naught else?

I’ve grown tired, worn, raw, without the strength
Of purpose that marked my youthful step
The soul’s no width nor breadth nor length
Without limits she ranges, beyond all precepts,
All notions of you and me, of how things are
Still I am stuck as if from my own soul so far
that I reside in some little space
some sordid broken boring place
cut off from the Light
shorn from what makes all alright.

A spear in my gut, long launched by arm unknown
A tear through my heart, long crunched in harm unseen
Walk home from dance, bent over the hurt that’s shown
Through my façade. I heave, yell, grunt like a wounded thing
Through center Brooklyn. I sob I say I can’t do this alone.
I say I said but no one wants to hear a man whimper, moan
About this wound he’s wound around,
Of some story he’s never found,
About lonely, tired, empty — not just for a minute but on twenty-some years

I see us through pines over sandy earth
You with your overkill bowie knife
In it’s giant leather sheath as we search
For nothing, confident that life
Will open forward as it should

Do you remember when elections were adjustments?
Before our nation stopped hearing itself?
A hole was left when shared-meaning up and went.
A hole for Trump, for the conman whose stealth
Is only lying over and over again.
Not so clever. But adequate when
Republicans have already learned
That what Democrats say must be spurned.

I don’t know what to do.
A man injured in his pit,
Still trying to make it through,
But caught on some old shit
He can’t hold, can’t catch, nor see
So many years alone looking to be
A man a person a this a that
And Trump breaks elections, peddles lies
He wanted to help, push back
On the evil, on how democracy dies
And with it our shared meaning
Our path to grow together singing
God’s praises in our own voices
In ways true to our own choices
True worship is a free act
True fellowship’s the compact
That I will hear you and you me
That I will not fear you nor you me
That together we will think, feel, be
Not perfectly, but well enough to build
Our conversation and country as we jointly will

This life that’s become me doesn’t match me
though I’ve become it and it me
strange strange
tiringly odd

Author: De voor Dorc
Editors: Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown
Copyright: AM Watson