Wait For November

That’s what they all tell us now.

Just wait, wait until November. 

On one side of the country the fire spreads like a rampant virus out of control, on the other half it floods and there is no summer, in the middle everyone suffocates under oppressive heat. Prison camps are thrown up to cage babies. Adultery is made a biblical action. Mass murderers are praised by a leader. Free press is challenged. Law is twisted. Allies are pissed on. Enemies are praised. But just wait, the voters will make it better. They said something similar back in 2016. That already feels like a million years ago. They say, just wait until November, the promised one is coming. And she did not come. She failed the small people, ignored them almost entirely. She eclipsed an opponent with malicious tactic. Meanwhile as she catered to her richest of backers a snake slithered out from the fields and whispered sweet treachery. He called to the sick and ignored. He smiled, and he danced. They laughed and they offered their shoulders to carry him. He climbed their spines and took the throne. Sex, lies and scandal blocked a road to a new day, and a bridge of fantasy took the desperate dreamers up, and up on a cloud of nostalgia. The cloud obscured the drop. It won’t come back, it can’t come back, tomorrow is impossible to stop. 

Wait until November. 

They both are saying it now. The left, the right. Both are convinced that we are in trouble now, but both are stagnant entities in a roiling, raging, storm. Guns can kill the innocent, but cannot save you from a mad man. 

They wait, while the sinners play. The puppeteer dawdles his watchers. His show plays on: traitor, mischief, liar, divisive, divider. 

Wait!

Says the opposition, as they sit and watch, powerless to deflect anything.

Wait...

Whispers a man cowering behind his desk, distracting a lunatic with deception and trickery, asking us to trust in him that the situation is under control. 

Wait! 

Says this station, and that station, this camp, and that camp.

Wait, and vote.

So we wait for our turn to throw in to the suggestion box. But the box is on fire. Our ideologies are on fire. There is no truth—only his truth, or her truth, and any other truth is Fake News.

Until November we lock down our plastic bubbles and double down. But plastic veils won’t help us in a nuclear blast. 

We can’t be wrong, because if we are not right we lose. But if we are right we lose. Because we are broken, and the wheel is lost. Jesus be damned! The devil has got that shit. The storm is fierce, and it is inescapable. But we did this. We waited too long. 

Until November we will drink in our partisan conspiracies. The chasm grows. The ground sinks. The earth is opening. And the beast is hungry. 

On November we will be drunk on bullshit.

After November the tides may clash, the walls will close, the jaws clamp down, and the small people will be stuck with a choice they will not like.

In November we lose.

We let a wolf corner the nation. We let a foreign agent inject us with poison. 

No matter how it happens now,

One way or the other it will be over. 

And the Lodestar will fall like Wormwood.

And a third of the world will be sick, and inundated by woe. 

But wait for November. 

What the hell else can we do. 

Scrawl out your ballot in Blood. 

2018

I know I will.