WHERE WOULD YOU BE RIGHT NOW?

So many days have felt like the most awful morning for all of us, November 9, 2016. I still remember waking up, feeling as if my brain and spirit were violently barfing, while my innards dragged behind me. And I was still in bed.

This may shock you, but the trauma of the World Trade Center collapses was far less than the putsch of the Trump and the Triumph of the Kochs. I was within three miles of the towers. I heard the planes overhead. I heard the flotillas of ambulances racing down Seventh Avenue. But the day after Trump was elected was worse.

We depressives can get into something like a fugue state, a dissociative disorder, where we barely know what's going on. I have really only experienced this once that I can clearly remember. The past year has felt like a mild, mental-wool-covered year.

It's so bad today that Janet has turned off the tv and gone to sit in the garden even though it is a cool and overcast morning. I wonder what she still understands as her short term memory is completely gone. She watches endless repeats of Rachel Maddow, Bryan Williams, Shark Tank, and HGTV shows. That's what she can follow, I think. But this is getting to her, all this disaster. And the big disaster.

Is anyone working on a new vocabulary of despair, insults, and dystopia? Shitgibbon is my go-to if I can remember it. All the air and vitriol has gone out of every word of dismay, astonishment, outrage, and slander at my disposal.

And then in my head, all I can hear is a somewhat regrettable song by The Doobie Brothers, Long Train Runnin' ...

Down around the corner, half a mile from here
See them long trains run, and you watch them disappear
Without love, where would you be now
Without lo-o-o-ove

You know I saw miss Lucy down along the tracks
She lost her home and her family and she won't be coming back
Without love, where would you be right now
Without lo-o-o-ove

The song doesn't really quite make it intellectually or lyrically, but that chorus works.

We are so fucked.




Coda.

I wasn't going to include a poem, but I randomly opened to this.

STAR BLOCK

There is no such thing
as star block.
We do not think of
locking out the light
of other galaxies.
It is light
so rinsed of impurities
(heat, for instance)
that it excites
no antibodies in us.
Yet people are
curiously soluble
in starlight.
Bathed in its
absence of insistence
their substance
loosens willingly,
their bright
designs dissole.
Not proximity
but distance
burns us with love.

— Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, New York, Grove Press, 2010.