'Twas the Day Before the Election

Hey Friends,

I want to take you back to the day before the election. Mon Nov 7, 2016 was a rather strange day for me. I'm usually a peaceful little hobbit minding my own business at home & rarely do I seek the noise of "out there." But every once in awhile a day takes a wrong turn and you find yourself walking far, far from home to get away from the ominous drone in your head.

Drone of one's own sudden locomotive urge and a sense that something is so wrong in the world you may kill yourself if you don't walk out the front door & keep going til you reach the sanctuary of your youth…

…the place where you spent so many hours trying to feel like the sun & the trees & the stars & even the blood that ran through you belonged as much to you as to the people who claimed it all freely & loudly w/out ever questioning whether it was theirs….

…the place that's undergone its own drastic transition since you last took refuge there in your 20s….

I walked an hour to get there, among the people and the beautiful banyans…and I continued to feel "weird"--no words for it--not my occasional T rage, not the excruciating anxiety of 2015, nor the overflowing sadness of '14---but a sickening combo of all that plus a dollop of some new ingredient I didn't recognize.

Of course now I recognize it as that psychic ailment I get when big weird things are just around the corner.

Here's a …..poem…..I wrote while out of my hobbitzone

************

Not the infinite coda of worry

Premature electorate

Orange death rattle softens to static

White noise left over from all races

Popcorn hisses & licorice whacks

I had to leave the house today

AWOL from my hermit stronghold

Painfully detached from self, others, breakdown, recovery

All that work to piece my stained glass facets into a parable

Worth a new gospel, grown up coloring book wax on shrieking alabaster

White house of padded worship, isolationism

I volunteered to be a one-way sensory overload; a listener for life

All around the thrust of voices, pistons striking my whole organic amphitheater temple

No congregation shall be powered by

Sick children

Nail polish bitch bishops taking over private homo church

And its secretly sick adults

Sports w/ balls or politics

Poker Pokemon Pox VOX POP

Broken A/C rescue dog nipping sick sad children under vestments

Histrionic bitemark appears to be a somatic apparition deacon

Banyan canopy above my picnic

So I walked

Far from all those memories of WHY

Why I remain a) alive  b) alone  c) unable to reach my closest primate relatives without plugging into

Streaky blue small talk chakra / direct current here but alternating in afterlife transactions 

My larynx smashed against my jawbone

The dragonfly thought it was a dog  I begged it to heal my flattened heart

I begged for its contempt but it smiled and went to have drinks w/ a helicopter

International airport lifts the lonely cat-free child-heavy crowd so I can pass

Now I practice

Giving no shits "HELLO!" I shout at the rough hewn mister whose home is in the permanent sun

Or was red from crying at a severed phone service, or who just paid a boy still fuzzy & equine for a

Right swipe reach around in Starbuck's upstairs shit pantry.

Not overthinking his precondition how "HELLO" will hit him

Like I always overthink a thing and end up unfriendly

Most words never make it past my teeth and flow through my fingers instead

But I shoved my voice in his face

Like all voices & opinions are shoveled at me faster than I can

Dig out of my reverie 

Of course I got no response which flicked the

Sarcasm on/off on/off on/off til it caught fire & I belted at the grey-collars

Driving their golf cart down the sidewalk "Get the fuck outta the way!" aka "Punch me!"

I never would've begged for rape's pink slip

But I'll put in a request for a black eye

Who the fuck is my new hormone boss?

Stuporvise me. I enter the newly gated & scaffolded Xingxing Xxxxxm Grxxnds where 

I once freely walked & sat & sketched & danced & fantasized & kissed the naked rears of statues 

But where I am accosted by elderly wXmXn more afraid than I of home's resounding hive-silence

Telling me I need to check in at the desk before I can sit or walk or sketch 

"WHAT FOR??" I say w/out over or underthinking or caring or worrying how it will reflect on my upbringing or if anyone will want to hurt me for it

"We need you to leave your zipcode at the desk"

"THIS HAS BEEN MY ZIP CODE FOR FORTY YEARS, BEFORE THE DESK WAS EVER HERE"

I proceed right to the outdoors and no one volunteers to stop me.

Octopus colony of banyans beyond rose garden thorned with babies & sunlight. I try benches for thrones, picnic tables like a fairy princess. I am not at home. The world reeks of oysters but not my own.

Moment of clarity: I'm not so separate from others as I am from my own greatness.

I never met that clone. When you see no end to loneliness your sleight of overthought comes to the rescue

My privilege to be lonely for no common you's & they's could corrupt my program

Crude as a lite brite, future spirograph flower more angelic than 011110010110100101110000

The lips that drip like hoses, the faces unzipped for every needling notion

Too patterned for my wild genius

Right. No one flowers after eons of clarity lead only to

Regression

Intellect w/ no angelic emotional oversight

You haven't clenched that moment and stretched it into a terminal masterpiece

Your claw-machine loosens its grip

On that fuzzy little chicken-beats-egg thesis 

Lost to sick kids, dogs

Broken hunger nail polish chipped window enamel rectangle hacked

A great oboe-blast of wind and children barking me away to a new spot where i write, pelicans splash,

German tourists drag their sandals What would Hitler say? 

Fussen auf! Marz! 

More children drawn to my angry genderless personal space

I offer a gentlemanly 'hi' to the boy in glasses

Who hovers like a mosquito too close to my nerves

And like a charm my acknowledgement disperses him

A flock of tiny molecules who need their mother

More than a sweaty stranger on a harsh covalence of bench

[I need liquid. But which restroom will I use?]

I could feel Satan within a 10 mile radius

So I ended up in the men's room first time since over saturating news w/ potty mouth debate

Made me a glaring error  A room for emperors w/ no mirror

To watch your plastic lunchmeat genitals leak

I almost hoped for a run-in w/ a gender nazi

A sausage inquisitor or heart-attackable G-pa

But I was alone in there with all my power

IMPOSE

DECLARE

ENFORCE

PROCLAIM

INFLICT

DICTATE

11-7-16

*******************

All right. That was a poem about my Hobbity little adventure before the election. I'm sure there will be more days like that one…I can feel it in the air, oh lord. But I'm ready for whatever comes, whatever I have to do to survive it. I found the courage to use the men's room unironically, but now I'm back to being scared again. I wish bravery was something I had all the time, but no…I only get it when I'm jacked up on adrenaline and cortisol and metabolized T.

I'll be back sometime w/ more adventures.