My Response to Everything Concerning Everything (that strange flower)

Sunset at Allison's
Twin Peaks, CA July 2019

is poetry, and it's not what I write but what I want to read, words floating up or by like fish in my mind. Wallace Stevens comes to mind complacencies of the peignoir.

In the span of let's say five minutes I scanned just scanned words strung together (scan, scroll, read?) Mitch McConnell Mitch Moscow his voice a drone the rap something about something and then a star not of the sky (the stars' wrapping) but of rap his radiance in Sweden who threw a guy across a street which I believe is assault (the Swedes say) but whom POSPOTUS wants out (of Swedish jail) encouraged by the Kardashian paper doll who put on clothes that her husband ordered up designed that covered her famous breasts and ass and fly waist and Cinderella feet so that she could pose with the men in orange, most recently, take a selfie and

S
T
A
N
D

U
P for justice reform and Ikea be boycotted (Ikea being Danish not Swedish but who cares but meatballs and lingonberries and soft-serve cones) and wait, who do we support here? 

remember: five minutes (maybe ten including the footage of the blue-eyed Eilish)

they ended with Meghan Markle editing British Vogue and insisting on freckles and then the photo of the boy standing in grass his thin-lipped sweetness smile shot dead at a garlic festival by another angry white man with a gun.

Precious child.

Another one (or two) added to the piles of dead children.


I've stood in a sunflower field with my sons in Gilroy.

















There's humor in befuddlement or is it wry or rue?





Here's the poem.


Gubbinal

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed —
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

Wallace Stevens



I think we (you) suffer from an intellectual laziness, a lack of imagination.


Like Stevens' also wrote:

People are not going

To dream of baboons and periwinkles. 

On another note, I am learning about pleasure.

(and no, I am not going mad but rather writing and wrestling with words)

They're Getting Kool-Aid™ Jammers and Animated Movies*

Children do not belong in detention centers. "Detention centers" appears to be a more acceptable term than "concentration camps." Families belong together. This is now a popular trending hashtag. So is Close the Camps Now. Last night I attended a vigil downtown at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center, where over 1000 men are being held. We gathered outside the facility with 4000 people, just over the 10 freeway. Some people brought Mylar blankets as a sign of solidarity, fashioning brilliant flags and scarves out of them. The incarcerated children have been given such blankets to cover themselves during detainment.

We held our flashlights, electric candles and phone lights up toward the building, and the men inside flashed their own lights through the tiny slits in the imposing walls. It felt futile to be there and powerful at once, but mostly futile.

One of Sophie's caregivers, a legal resident originally from Guatemala thanked me for going, and I felt ashamed. There is much tension in our city as families gear up for tomorrow's ICE raids.

Meanwhile, Terrible America provides snacks and movies to the thousands of children separated from their families, languishing in private facilities whose boards are stocked with profit-hungry rich men, rich men who've protected one another in the vilest of ways. Perhaps the vilest of them all, the POSPOTUS, plays golf, presides over rallies and is cheered by the most ignorant people in the country. The most powerful people in the country who continue to support him have lost whatever shreds of moral authority they might have had and will, I imagine, go down in history as spineless, lacking even a modicum of integrity.

I'm curious. I had an exchange last year with someone who objected mightily to my outrage over separating children from their parents when they sought asylum at the border. Anonymous, what do you think of the camps now? How about the children separated from their parents? How about the conditions of the camps where thousands of men, women and children are being held?

Is this who we are?

* So reported F*^king Vie President Pence after a recent "visit" to a detention camp in Texas and proceeded to blame Congress for the over-crowded conditions in the men's facilities. The photo of him and his entourage smiling their greasy smiles of paternal solicitude made me sick.

Things That Made Me Cry in My Mind, 5/1/19

1. Kamala Harris grilling Barr (so much money and time literally wasted on these hideous people running the country even as we watch it burn, drown and fall)
2. The briefing filed by the Trump administration calling for the complete and total dismantlement of the Affordable Care Act (anxiety, again)
3. The story of the young man in North Carolina who charged the shooter and tackled him and was killed, the photo of him and his impossible life, interrupted by training on how to do such a thing and ended by doing such a thing (disbelief that people think owning guns ensures their safety and freedom)
4. The man in Georgia who lured a teenaged girl off a website for girls with eating disorders to come live with him, engaged her in brutal sex acts and kept her in a cage for some of that time but will not serve any prison time because of the eight months he spent in a detention center prior to sentencing
5. The New York man who was sentenced to probation only for raping a 14 year old girl he met while driving a school bus, who, according to the judge, only raped one girl, rather than multiple
6. People close to me who recently made statements supporting the racist POSPOTUS who is also a sexual predator  and who also would take away the very thing that enables my family to live somewhat more comfortably with Sophie's epilepsy (the tears were real)
7. The article about retail botox centers where you can get injectables as conveniently as hair blow-outs

Reader, I imagine you'd rather see a list of things that make one grateful. 

1. The fluke of a blue whale, seen yesterday from a boat just off the shore of Newport Beach (the tears were real) 

Where is Jesus?

I haven't written in this space in more than a week, and the last thing I wrote was just fluff, just superficial bullshit, just aggravating minor bad luck goofy stuff that's a mask, all resolved now. I'm walking around doing laundry, taking care of Sophie, exchanging texts with my favorite sacrilegious caregiver friend, feeling solidarity and shedding tears with and for another caregiver friend, Christy Shake, whose most recent post might have ripped my heart out of my body but instead provoked its beating a little harder a little faster. We are ALIVE. I love you, Christy. Who is Calvin and who is Sophie?Who are we without these cares? Must we define ourselves by care? Who are we at all?

Where is Jesus?

Shouldn't he have shown up by now and cleared the tables in Washington, D.C., kicked them over and thrown those who claim to believe in him out on their privileged, hypocritical, stupid, vision-less asses? Shouldn't that POSPOTUS be punished by now, disgraced and bound in a public stockade?  Why is that man from Georgia so hell-bent on power that he's denying suffrage to tens of thousands of people? Is he afraid of the black woman that he is running against? Why are Georgians not ashamed? Are they punch (or should I say beer) drunk on power? I am ashamed that I pass countless homeless persons on every single corner of this great city. I pass them by. Why have the Koch brothers spent so much money on propaganda against climate change? What are these sacrosanct values that conservative peoples espouse? Why do so many people bear arms? The man in the park in Sedona last week, pushing his mother in a wheelchair to an overlook, the rushing water below, the sky blue above, a large gun strapped to his thigh. Did he feel safer? Freer? He made me sick. Why exactly is the POSPOTUS administration now going to "erase" transgendered people? Define humanity by their genitals at birth? Who will be next?

Will we have to fight? Parents against their grown children. Cousins estranged. Friendships severed. And anger, so much anger, and it won't be squelched.

No stranger to the catastrophizing that comes with great stress (I step over a curb and imagine my body flung by passing traffic, the descent into the red rock canyon surely must be swift), I am yet dazed, struck dumb, bewildered.

I am furious.

“I have been beaten, my skull fractured, and arrested more than forty times so that each and every person has the right to register and vote. Friends of mine gave their lives. Do your part. Get out there and vote like you’ve never voted before.”

—Congressman John Lewis

Poetry with Senior Citizens

How's that for soothing? The steam from my coffee cup literally swirling up and out and can't you smell those peaches and the pears are buttery and the sun, always the sun. The calm certainly belies the simmering rage I feel, especially tonight after seeing the POSPOTUS give one of his inimitable rally speeches, this time in the great state of Mississippi, where he mocked Dr. Ford. The backdrop was a bunch of hooting and hollering white men and women who, I suppose, are his base and never was there a better word to describe them.

We need to turn this thing around.

Here's something else to soothe our souls. I'm teaching a couple of creative writing classes to senior citizens. They are lovely men and mostly women in a couple of assisted living homes here in Los Angeles, and I got the job by applying through one of those newfangled job search engines. I won't be putting either of my two boys through college or putting in an adapted bathroom for Sophie with my pay, but I already really like doing it. The group that I've seen twice is particularly fragile -- both physically and cognitively -- but they can be inspired to tell the most vivid stories. I am always the first, one woman began, her words unfurling to describe her early childhood days in the cotton fields of Texas, plowing and picking. Another woman opens one eye and glares at me. I've got NOTHING to tell you, she says and closes her eye. She's so hostile that I sort of love her. She also told me at the end of the class (she contributed nothing) that's a pretty dress, and I said thank you. I recited Joy Harjo and played a Native American water song. A man in a Dodgers cap whose chin lay on his chest while he gently snored through the entire first class was lively in the second one. When prompted to write about someone in your life who is important he chose his son and said He always does the right thing and organized this whole thing when there was all this darkness and trouble. 

The stories. Everyone has a story.

Except for that POS that is running ruining our country. I know I'm not supposed to wish harm on any living being but damn. And the people who support him? The word scratch. The word eye. The word out.


#smashthepatriarchy



Here's a poem.

All the Difficult Hours and Minutes

All the difficult hours and minutes 

are like salted plums in a jar. 

Wrinkled, turn steeply into themselves, 

they mutter something the color of  sharkfins to the glass. 

Just so, calamity turns toward calmness. 

First the jar holds the umeboshi, then the rice does.

Jane Hirshfield

PSA for These Difficult Times

Letting my snaggle tooth hang out

You're exactly where you're supposed to be this moment. I tend to project all my fear out into the future, but you know what? It's my present that's terrifying at times, and I have to tell myself that I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be this moment, over and over and over. Sometimes cliches are necessary.

Here's the PSA part of this post:

Do you listen to The Daily? It's a daily podcast that digs deep into a pertinent issue for twenty minutes, five days a week. The New York Times does it, so I suppose some of you out there reading will say it's fake news or liberal biased media or whatever lazy cliches are being thrown about. I say lazy because we're all subject to lazy, particularly intellectual laziness, and these times call for us to gird our loins and pay attention and read quality journalism and listen to careful, investigative work. I think The Daily does important reporting, and from what I've listened to for many months, it appears to cover sides of an issue when that's pertinent but also THE FACTS as they appear to our eyes and ears.

Truth is always truth, contrary to what you might have heard out of the Powers That Be's very own mouths.

Today's podcast was Part One of a two-part series called Divided: How Family Separations Started, 

and it'll blow your mind and break your heart.

Recently, I wrote a post detailing my happiness at Sophie finally starting her new adult day program. One of my Anonymous commenters wrote this:

What, you are happy with a great program for Sophie. That is wonderful. But what about all the children separated from their parents at the border?

I replied:

Anonymous, what do you mean? Have I forgotten that our government kidnapped thousands of children and put them in internment camps. Never. Doing what I can — do you need info or resources on how you can help them?

I suspect that this is the same Anonymous who spent a lot of time on an earlier post of mine defending the separation policy, so I'm hoping that she listens to the podcast. I wonder, too, whether her feelings about the great tragedy on our borders have evolved at all. The reason why I'm wondering is because I think it's going to take as many people as possible to exact justice. Yesterday, the POSPOTUS himself blessed and spoke warmly to those who work for ICE and for their actions at the border. 

So what can we do about the clusterfuck beyond educating ourselves? The obvious solutions are to pressure your representatives to work toward reuniting these children with their families, to vote for those people who fight injustice, to donate money or even donate and subscribe to the ACLU, to protest whenever there are gatherings, to hold your government responsible, to speak the truth and refrain from arguing that there's any reason at all to separate any child from his or her parent because they are seeking asylum or a better life for their families and happen to have brown skin.

Here are some more ideas that I found on the Internets.

1. Become a child advocate.
2. Become a Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for young people in foster care or donate to your local CASA program
3. Donate to Comfort Case which gives backpacks of comfort items to kids in foster care
4. Volunteer to visit people in immigration detention.
5. Help transform your faith community or business into a sanctuary space.
6. If you happen to be a lawyer, paralegal or law student, a number of organizations are looking for pro bono volunteers.

Click HERE for more information and links to explore the above.

The Daily

#familiesbelongtogether

#resist

#FamiliesBelongTogether

Venice Blvd.
Los Angeles, California
June 20, 2018

Do you remember as a child getting separated from your mother in a public place? I was with my mother shopping one day and probably in a world of my own, in my head, day-dreaming as she walked through aisles of clothes racks. I can't have been more than six or seven and perhaps even younger. At some point I grabbed the hand hanging in my view and looked up simultaneously, thinking it was my mother. Except it was not. It was a stranger. I remember that moment of terror -- only a moment because the woman whose hand I'd grabbed looked kindly at me, and my own mother was in sight -- like it was yesterday. A moment of terror. At being separated from my mother.


Is there anything else to do but think about, agitate about, write about and above all, ACT ABOUT these children separated from their parents at the United States border. Despite the POSPOTUS' rescinding of the policy he and his henchman initiated and the band of thugs who have carried it out, it's unclear whether hundreds, if not thousands of these babies and children will ever be reunited with their parents.

Babies in tents.

Where are the girls?

I'm making all the POS folks who supported this policy irrelevant in my mind. I'm not responding to their inane, inhumane arguments.  Those who believe America to be a Christian nation. The vile human who made a joke about a child with Down Syndrome being separated from parents. I'm brushing them away.  Those who compare the people of Mexico and Central America to vermin. Be gone.

And those who invoke the great peace leaders of the world and admonish us not to be angry, that it's all about love -- step aside. The great peace leaders were plenty angry, and they used their anger in constructive ways to bring peace. You step aside, too, or step up.

Here are some things we can do:

What You Can Do Right Now to Help Immigrant Families Separated at the Border

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images