It’s cold in America tonight. It rained briefly here in Santa Barbara today and the clear air behind the little front of wet is pressing on the house. But in America it is more than literally cold. Our hemisphere is blandly tilting away from the sun’s equinoctial rays, but that’s just what it does this time of year, even in times of hope and clarity. The nights are long and clear and the road to anywhere that matters, where hope and consolation can be found, seems longer than it did in October. Or is it me? I look around the Internet for the usual lights of insight and find dark windows…

Gloom, despair, and agony on me
Deep, dark depression, excessive misery

No joke, serious; so much depression. Many of my favorite poets and writers, bloggers and vloggers – normally uplifted and uplifting people – have stopped generating content. Vlogger Chris Pirillo in Seattle says he hasn’t picked up his camera in weeks. Blogger and actor Wil Wheaton in Los Angeles is working the Kubler-Ross stages of grief like a tautological litany; a long day’s journal into an existential feedback loop.

America the Plum Blossoms are Falling

All through the social networks, there is so much anger. All of the cries of “no, wait, you can’t, he’s insane, he’ll destroy everything our parents built and ruin everything we might have left behind as well” are dying away like a long freight train that took 2 weeks to rumble to a stop. Now the anger is turning from Big Cheeto and the Fetus Funeral Kid to the townspeople who brought this lunacy down around our heads.

I’m experiencing the same kind of writer’s brain-lock by the way; it’s much worse than writer’s block. I can write but do you think I want to be writing this current events drivel? Do I seem to have the talent for it? Hell no. I’m a poet and a writer of the quiet ontological rooms at the back of the house. The dusty guest bedrooms, where the shoes in the closet belong to the beloved dead. I hate what’s happening in the consciousness of the country almost as much as what’s happening in the streets, the schools, and in the dooryards of the mosques and synagogues.

So I don’t blame the angry people; in fact, I have to join them. This wasn’t an election of a new president and vice president for these United States. This wasn’t a shift from liberal to conservative, from tax and spend to budgetary frugality (a myth, anyway). This was a fucking coup e’etat; a putsch. Our country has been illegally overthrown. Trump had help from foreign powers including Russia. And the Director of the FBI interfered with the election. So America the Beautiful has voted – by a margin so slim it raises the specter of  capital crimes- to become a much different nation than we were.

It’s one thing to want a new president for the country, it’s another to want a different country. And instead of a president, let’s let these crazyass racists who hate everybody run the shit. Nope, you can bring in a new pitcher but we’re not switching from baseball to Mayan basketball, where the losers get their heads chopped off. And come to think of it, Hillary won the damn election anyway. But I digress.

No. No. No! I will not accept the United States becoming a racist, fear-mongering land of knuckle-dragging simian celebrants of some misbegotten, pathetic Nazi cult of ignorance. I do not acquiesce; I demur. You don’t like it, bite me. I’ve lost all tolerance for fools. And I pity the next one I hear sneering about sour grapes and poor losers.

[Shit] Here, watch this excellent video and read an old poem. I’m running out of words, pitching a fit or a fever, and I need to make sure the lights of the coastline are still shining in the cold.

    “next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

– e e cummings