Charlottesville, 8/12/2017

In the early moments,
we didn’t know who it was
behind the wheel
or who it was
that was dead.

So, for a half-hour,
it was just a death.

Unaffiliated.

And it didn’t matter whose
it was.

And then I watched the video.


And then it mattered.

Anything All of the Everything

Events of Summer quickly ensue, it takes hold of you quickly, while the police drive thru. You cannot find it half-way into the night, you could hold up on a park bench or lay your blanket on the slough. Perhaps when your dreams kick, your asterisks will come, build a map of your defense and then head for the sun. Some foe outwit the wounds of life, furry blister-like faces, when they take up the star dust diamonds, the trail guides take after hurrying up paces.

The festivities of fear are living oaths inside of marbled starve rocks, they harvest shoots and ladders, and keep tabs on wild beasts and livestock. There's no match throughout the campgrounds. There's no matchbook light to find us. If you're quick enough with your 70s, then perhaps you'll follow the nightness that's arrived us.

In aide of her lift-gate, shredding pensive miens and speeding mimes, taking ward of one thousand fathomed depths, assumes courageous anti-hate isms. She can come quickly with a syzygy, her van packed with fresh woes of Sunday, then around Monday humbly hides her stuff in the small hems of her bed linens. You can't outwit the governess who preys on handicapped children's thrift finds. She makes clothes and keeps her hands to bed. She bares new graves for time's new roman epithets and moving pictures. She  unplugs her bleeding tongues under some new sone for her monarchic archetypical audiophile party.

While the umberphiles sleep, nyctophiliacs stalk grizzlies. Mosquitos quaff at human blood, while their offspring keep drinking. The idle bugs throes, misanthropic and useless, teach electric lusters' mouths to grow into fiery hoops with which to slip past all the clueless.  The arachnids might dance, the haunting verbs they might fray. The Egyptians at first glance, try to hide their heroine pyramids away.

So hush little violet dormant flowers, fake your fertility and keep your skeptic drink. Keep each one you might meet, within one hundred feet of where you sleep. Keep your arms length's supine, your supplies out of reach, practice wrapping yourself up inside boxes where the souls can sleep.

If you only once catch a fool, avoid the plague-speak certain lips might tell. Each uttered word commanded with too much ******* across the bandwidth. Mortal courses can't be taught, human voices can't keep the draught, ferocious abstract engineered humanity has escaped this truant absence and immorality. You, you catch a fool, she could preach hurts and djinns, it could dot the I's of when, and unfurl the sighs of men. Berthed earthlings that the **** ascribes, hurts the worthless and sours true purpose widths of curfews and its curses, all these biomes perfervidly reserve the fury for their furtive perversity, elements to obscure the telemetry that has coddled such a dark conflagration of immensity, it's the cluelessness of these transgressors that forces the abhorrence towards all-white-everything professors.

“If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,”
She wrote, and stepped out into massive division
Where white faces twisted and drew from the tension
And shouted their hate and of a toxic vision
Where no one is welcome but the racists beside them
And she stood alongside the crowd who would fight them,
Against the cowardly cadre of cancerous citizens
Who screamed and hissed and threatened with riot
So the whole world would hear their naked hate bias

Soon one of them split and returned with a squeal
The man pressed on the pedal, his hands gripped the wheel
Charging his brothers and sisters, he didn’t even feel
An ounce of humanity, which his hatred did steal
When he crossed the threshold of murderous thoughts turned real
And his brothers’ bodies broke when they collided with steel
And his sisters slammed down, crushed and killed by a wheel

Now in a jail cell he sits where the judge denied freedom
His shoulders were slumped, the guards at attention
And his thoughts haven’t slipped or fallen to reason
And they’ll stay with him until death seizes him
Now Heather is gone, but she’s known by a nation
And her cause doesn’t end but begins with every new daybreak
When one mind is changed, a community can follow
Until then our country will cry and repeat it tomorrow

Torches lit the night sky,
A glowing river of flames
Burning with the passion of hate.

Body after body marching on,
Faces devoid of any humanity
And a grotesque amusement
Sparkling in their eyes.

Senseless chants piercing the air,
The place quickly becoming a gathering
Of ignorance and hatred.

The minutes tickled by,
The violence spreading like a wildfire—
No act of kindness strong enough to
Extinguish it.

**** flags painted the sky a ****** red,
The white no longer a sign of peace,
But rather the symbol of white supremacy.

America.
This is what the place we call "home" has become.

No one can claim to be blameless
while innocent people die.
We’re making the horror possible
by aiding or standing by.

I had a week of bliss, surrounded by love and friendship;
Diversity in color, sexuality, and creed.  
The 'oh-my-God-I'm-gonna-die' turbulence on the flight home,
[Which the pilot coyly called "rough air"],
Was nothing compared to the avalanche of awful I hit after exiting the ramp.
Slammed into the tarmac, engulfed in hate.
My eyes wide open to the bigotry and sin.
[I say sin, not because I believe in it, but because they do.]
Here are my eyes, slammed wide open,
Reading article after article on Charlottesville.
Begging, waiting, for the President to make a stand,
To give us some hope,
To unequivocally denounce white supremacy,
To show some compassion,
To say Heather Heyer's name,
To demonstrate to the world what human decency is.
...I keep waiting.

This was not about partisan politics.
This was not about 'right' or 'left'--
This is about right and wrong.

This is not about partisan politics.
Hate transcends politics.
This was not a chance to pander to or pacify voters.
This was a grim opportunity to be truly presidential in a time of great need.

A person should never experience such radical hatred
for being born the way they were born--
Exactly the way your God made them.

Freedom of speech and expression was not created for the benefit of Neo-****'s.
It was created to liberate Americans, not oppress them.
You cannot [ab]use it as a shield to mask your abhorrent agenda.
You cannot randomly yell “FIRE!” in a crowded theater that is not, in fact, on fire;
Nor can you create a fire on a stick then run through a crowd, spouting off your beliefs.

Here are my eyes, slammed wide open
And all I wanted to do was to shut them,
To go back to my bubble of bliss.
But I cannot.
We cannot.
That is exactly what gives hate and ignorance the permission to spread like wildfire.
The lovers need to keep loving.
We need to keep speaking out against violence for violence's sake;
Against oppression of an entire race, simply because of melanin;
Against discrimination of the "different";
Against the ideal of "the perfect race";
Against the idle tolerance of these obscene, disgusting ‘ideals’.
We need to keep speaking out against "taking back our country"--
We are living on stolen soil.
We are all visitors here.

Where did your ancestors come from, sir, wielding the fiery torch?
This land is not yours.
It is not mine.
It is ours--
All of ours, together.