“More than a decade after the first strong signals of the collapse (or at least the twilight) of the American empire, there is yet to be a melancholic reckoning with the decline of empire…” ~ Anis Shivani
“It is difficult to get the news from poems…” argues William Carlos Williams, & yet, fellow poet Philip Metres adds (in this essay for the Poetry Foundation) how many poets have historically functioned as journalists. From archivists to agitators, the voices of all those willing to sound the alarm bells & speak truth (when the rest of the world goes silent) are the ones that ring throughout the ages to reach us today… I claim to be no such poet, & would be lucky to have even a single line of what I write survive my death. But I’ve been using poetry to help me cope with the news for over a decade—so the day a maniac at the helm of our country threatened a civilization, all I could do was write this one.
American Doomsday
What if I told you that you had one hour left, America? Who—presuming anybody—would you want to spend it with? Or what would you want to do, where would you want to go do it, & when did this fear become the new normal? I ask myself these questions every day. I try to be brave enough to ask my country... What if it is our own finger on the trigger, our own hand pointing the guns toward our own heads? Why the self-destructive tendencies? False bravado of a gun-slinger walking into town after sunset when the curtains have already been drawn on a gruesome scene, the bodies already collected & dressed by the women for burial... Men to be mourned by the children they leave behind—if there are any children left, at all, by the time the dust settles. We put real guns into their hands, & real bullets into those guns... We warned mothers not to care so much, or to look the other way—to turn the other cheek, or to be slapped into silence.
American Martyr
Almost a decade ago, I wrote and self-published a Protest Poem which I never really stopped writing… Hundreds of drafts later, I’ve begun assembling these pieces into what will most likely be my third full-length manuscript of poetry.