Elections, Poems, and Books

One of the biggest influences for me in 2020 is a man named Rollo May: his books have helped unleash the cascade of thoughts, ideas, and pain I internally feel for a country that has done me much good while taking from so many unlike me. Some of those are pouring out in poetry that I will perform whenever we can return to open mic night or I have the studio space built to record them. Most have been thrown into a book that I am somewhere near 60% finished with. The purpose of this writing is to give you a preview of the book as a preface to a poem that I wrote yesterday: if one of us is bound by the chains of inequality we are all bound.

Do not expect change; affect change.

We cannot afford to be purists when it comes to our original social contract. And we cannot be so naïve as to expect the Supreme Court and Legislative branch to amend this contract coherent with the needs of a society when we offer little input. Representation works only when the Representative is voicing the opinion of those they stand in for. Yet, if those voices are mute how can one expect to be represented. If that all seems confusing suffice it to say do not send a builder to erect a home without a blueprint.

Drunk on Freedom: I am the Problem

I am the problem with America

Issues of inequality:

I blame, a political party.

There is, no future without equality,

If one man is bound by society

Then we all are enslaved by insanity

Yesterday, I saw through a blurry lens.

Today, I see clearly: your fate is my fate.

I must no longer hate

This feud I must cleanse.

I will stand in the gap for you, every day I take a breath.

 Not just when an election is near:

Not just when your family is visited by death

Of this I want to make myself clear.

I am the problem with America

Issues, of a, woman’s right:

I am as blind as night.

I am the problem in your life

Careless of a world, dead as an oxygen less arboretum.

Blissfully unaware of your strife;

Drunken on my freedom.

Yesterday, I was addicted to the taste of freedom

Today I no longer want my drunken state to suffocate,

To defecate;

To invalidate;

To deny, your chiefdom.

So, let me here,

Fight for freedoms you do not possess.

Let me, here, in modest verse, help to lift your fear:

Until there is no room, for even a single tear:

I am the problem with America

Encouraging hate through my silence:

Abdicating my power to a ballot,

Raising my fist in arrogant defiance

Drunken out of habit:

I am the problem with America:

No longer static.