How to Write a Political Poem During These Unprecedented Times

Say I begin with midsummer. July with the humidity thicker than a slice of wedding cake, and everyone acting less sane because of it. The chatter of crows loitering on powerlines that sag above the asphalt. The annoyance of a world ashamed of its own hubris. How I keep trying to be poetic, but then, isn’t all protest a kind of elegy to some change that needs to happen but dies along the way? The smolder before or after a riot. Which is to say, not precisely rioting, but people getting pulled apart slowly by tension at a deliberate rate. Or stepping off a sidewalk and into oncoming traffic to picket against the injustice-of-the-week. Not precisely anxious, but still straight jacketed by anxiety. Not precisely rebellious, but pulsing with rebellion in its blood.

* * *

I hate to mention it, but the most hazardous African-American behavior that I regularly engage in is simply existing. That’s why I raise a middle finger when that guy shouts All Lives Matter at me at the sandwich shop after glaring at my T-shirt. His spittled statement is not wrong, but the declaration of Black Lives Matter across my chest remains valid, too. That’s why I raise my middle finger when later, I bump into him, again, dodging eye contact in the cereal aisle of Target. My feelings all out in the open, with all the air gone out of me. The simmer-to-a-boil nature of annoyance on my tongue. The question not if? But when? The issue of where? And how? You know us writers, origami folding everything into flimsy analogies, our inner machinery ticking like time bombs. I know how to write about disastrous politics, but maybe all politics are disastrous in their own way. And maybe only partly salvageable. The written and rewritten. The proclaimed and redacted. The twisted and undone. Every poem I’ve ever penned becomes an elegy to some moment that may or may not have happened. Each sentence reluctantly raises both hands above its head, surrendering, hoping to not get shot.

* * *

It occurs to me to write this as a manifesto. As a confession. One afternoon, a friend jokes, “Bro, that’s enough about the struggle; after all, I am trying to eat lunch over here.” We are at the bar and grill that we frequent, and he keeps referencing movies I have never seen, television shows I have never watched, and books I have never read. But those books got banned in a state I once visited but never lived in, so I silently add them to my mental reading list as an act of defiance. I smirk and twirl the straw in my Jack and Coke. I am not thinking about how to write this, yet I always think about how to write this. Maybe a more poetic me would be drinking something that sounds more revolutionary – a Suffering Bastard or an Irish Car Bomb. But isn’t a cocktail named Irish Car Bomb inherently offensive? How would I feel if some bloke in Ireland bellied up to the bar and ordered an American School Shooting on the rocks? But that’s enough about the struggle, I am trying to eat lunch over here.

* * *

Because this world is made up equally of hope and desperation, it’s the weekend and I am trying to decipher the chaos. Trying to climb out of our current news cycle and away from the opinionated backlash it spawns. I keep hunting through alleys for the right dumpster to throw anything and everything into. And sometimes it works – one toss and the world’s problems become disposable. Or else, nostalgia becomes useless and pretty as an antique car, its gears rusting in the acid rain. They claim humanity’s survival gets easier with each additional experience, with every repetition. How we fall in love with peace before each upcoming war, feigning it might last for an eternity. How we lust for the silence that proceeds each statement as if the next will be entirely new.

* * *

A herd of outraged hipsters have assembled in a nearby park, staging a trendy revolution with signs, chants, lattes, and gender-neutral clothing. It appears wildly tame in the most well-intentioned way. They have grown weary of all the things in society that can inexplicably go wrong and inevitably will, one thing tumbling after another like dominoes. They have grown tired of the charade of contentment and the vague promises of politicians. I agree but don’t say much about it and instead have determined my time is better spent inside reading novels and drinking merlot. I’ve developed this trite analogy about taking a blade to the belly of the beast and the need to climb down inside and destroy whatever remains with a flamethrower, but it sounds irrational and dreadfully unfashionable amid the trendy revolution across the street. While they protest, I mostly just sit around, trying to not be the sort of guy who writes too many political poems – but it appears I’m failing at that. Mostly, I just author obscure literature that nobody reads and ponder how I can pay off my student loans without forgiveness.

* * *

Dear Reader, with my head tilted upwards, staring at apocalyptic skies, I confess the mainstream media convinced me with their endless loop of pandemic pandemonium news pornography that we are all going to die anyway. So why not make a ‘til the break of dawn house party out of our inevitable downfall? Why not pen love letters to all the things I could be instead of quarantined? Why not take this time I’m spending inside hanging out with self-doubt to overcome the trauma of childhood memories like having learned my father’s fists better than any lesson at school despite making the honor roll? Whoever died and made me king of literary bullshit fucked up royally. Size up my pain and skip whatever semantics your tongue might conjure to make things sound hollow and hopeless. My brothers still get hunted, our evolutions stay stunted, and we all remain haunted by the ghosts of everything that we forgot to say before. And there’s not a single therapist sitting judgmentally in their strip mall office on this forsaken planet who could extract a fraction of the fractured feelings I just wrote here.

* * *

Perhaps we sink too much energy into pretending to be unoffended when we really should feel insulted. As part of his unapologetic reign of bluster, one of our so-called leaders keeps teaching a master class on how to parlay hot takes and brash rhetoric into votes and profit. Meanwhile, I’m busy trying to write a poem that will finally put an end to bigotry, and yes, even within the false mythology of a post-racial society, bigotry still exists. It remains America’s most commonly known secret, although it might not be its dirtiest. It also remains America’s oldest addiction. We keep trying to wean ourselves from it, attempting to go cold turkey, yet we relapse nearly daily. We can all look up at the stars yet see different things. I think that’s positive, but for some folks, it’s likely a threat.

* * *

In this age of identity theft and catfishing, candor does count for something. Often, I claim the internet ruined me the way it wrecks most people. Slowly and tenderly rotting out all common sense, making room for ample conspiracy theories and clickbait articles. Lies get whitewashed, black-faced, and camouflaged until they look just like facts. The illusion of the truth is always more disturbing than genuine deception, a web full of rampant misinformation and deepfakes and AI-authored sponsored content. We all get allotted one sweet moment of online popularity only to get bitterly canceled soon after. Or worse, then we squander our days making polite apologies across multiple platforms until the word sorry seems diluted and impotent. Social media remains a perilous place. Its hazards are as exquisite as those private pictures of some Hollywood starlet that got leaked online and went viral. Pretty, but actually pretty terrifying.

* * *

I admit it – I am a mediocre hack at writing poetry. Mixing metaphors and derailing my runaway train of thought patterns. Loosening vowels and mucking up perfect stanzas. I write poems titled “Open Letter to the System” and “How to Master Emotional Ventriloquism While Being Gaslit,” but then worry while I stay busy pointing out society’s faults, someone else will expose mine. One night after closing time, I walked home from a bar, and it smelled like the entire world was on fire. The stars bright and sky clear and not at all manufactured for the sake of art. These facts true and not at all manufactured for the sake of art. But then again, it remains difficult to discern what is fabricated inside my head and what is assembled in yours. Or what collective hallucination gets shared by disadvantaged people chasing success in an unfair world. Or what apparitions of our history still haunt every block between here and there. I’d like to claim the moon was full, but I don’t recall, only that I kept walking further and further from the past until I could no longer see it or my future. How that seemed like an important and artful thing to remember. That, the clear sky, and everything burning.

* * *

I have simple questions, but none of them have easy answers. Isn’t the burden of the future to discover how wrong we were about the past? If a black person gets killed and no one hears it, does it still make a sound? How does a leader go about successfully offending people on both sides of an issue? Have we confused persevering with pretending, or have those words become synonyms for us? If each sunrise sounded like gunshots in your neighborhood, would you still stand for the national anthem? Which of the following words do you prefer: oppression, suppression, or depression? How can someone spot fine people in a crowd of Nazis and see hidden beauty in Confederate statues yet remain blind to the existence of prejudice? Is this about me being an unwilling follower or about our leaders being flawed? If the White House is a bully pulpit and social media is a bullhorn, can we switch off the internet to silence the stupid people? How will all this end? Either we know all the answers or none of them. Either way, we are probably screwed.

* * *

Eight out of ten of my friends believe the world is falling apart. Okay, I haven’t officially polled them, but it seems to be a consensus. Months before the election, no one feels comfortable in their skin. This dogged feeling of inevitable dread scratches at the backdoor each night like a wounded animal and howls. Shows its teeth and snarls at cab drivers and the closet racists at work. Makes friends with any door prepared to swing open in quick fashion, any staircase willing to become part of an exit strategy. Anything that would carefully remove the barbed hooks from our skewered psyches. Three out of five people would never consider running for public office, even if the voting was completely rigged in their favor. I haven’t conducted a formal survey, but it pretty much seems true.

* * *

When I was a kid, I kept getting bullied for my inventory of onlys, earning me scratches on my elbows, torn trousers, and bruises empurpled with blood. Only black kid in Honors English. Only black kid at the indie rock show. And, after a tweenage transfer, only black kid in the parochial school. My fingers shook with yearning, craving the faux veneer of acceptance, that mirage of equity automagically appearing and vanishing beneath some September moon. I’d love to say I don’t hate other people, but so often it’s hard to love them. Each one before me, grooves in the same warped record, the ones with preconceived notions, inherited arrogance, and implicit bias on their tracklists. I’d love to say I love other people, but really, my masochistic tendencies remain game for shaking hands and introducing myself to anything that might swallow me whole in one bite.

* * *

It’s summer, and on the news, men continue doing terrible things to women. Which honestly is not a fresh phenomenon, but nowadays, it gets documented better and mansplained more thoroughly. I am writing poems and drinking Guinness until my mood and stomach feel sour. Afflicted with the kind of frustration that hollows out the spirit from the spiritual. Makes the body hospitable to history’s phantoms and paper boats floating on the surface of polluted ponds. My toxicity is another guy’s merit badge. My complacency is another victim’s blind panic. Just because we ignore our problems, it doesn’t mean they’re closer to being solved. Just because we cope with pain, it doesn’t mean we’re closer to being healed. How all this emptiness fills a space we did not know existed, much less that it was large enough to host a tiny armageddon. And worse, that I could feign everything is fine, take my slice of heaven, and spread it out for myself while hell burns beneath it. What is, in fact, the weight of hope? Heavier than a heart? Heavier than the hand? By now I should be too bored to care, waving goodbye to the drama, the strife, the politics. But when I try writing about it, my palm catches the wind like a sail, teaching me the level of resistance needed to navigate this moment. When I try writing about it, my hand instinctively tightens into a fist hoisted high above my head.

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