I was it.
I married it.
I spawned it.
It took half a century to recognize its preciosity of corrosive crystals as my curse.
The blizzard coughed me out
I got stuck in the storm’s rapacious, rasping throat where
I ranted
I cried
I pleaded.
I left.
I never reasoned it through.
My escape from the cold
Driven by an impulse
Deep within a mind
On the brink of clinging
Itself out of existence.
My thaw
Was never noble because
It was not planned
Or mindful in its choice
Of direction
But heeding only a somatic undertow
Ushering me to a peaceful pause within the riptide
I could not formerly fathom or envision.
Would it not have been nobler to share such notions
In the pre-war days
Wherein Missouri unveiled her distended desperation
To nurture all the stifling secessionist self interest
Which muted her humanity?
By no means could such vexing views calling for just abolition
Be permitted or condoned as
Anything other than those of a misplaced madwoman
A pariah, humiliating polite Southern graceless gentility
Where snowflakes hold together for unrelenting sway.
Now the snowflakes' kobold drives the daily narrative
To ignore the martyred madwoman’s message
Which recurs, remarkably, ever the same.
The brute too remains unchanged and immutable.
He now even menaces the conservators of the righteousness Myth
Claiming exceptionalism, elegance, piety and blissful ignorance of surfeit injustices.
From Walter KGB’s poisoned tea and coder campaigns
To the caging of border innocents who will never be the same or sane,
The Keeper of the Myth defies the Elephants to squint at themselves
In his gaudy, gilded mirrors reflecting not even a feigned feint of semblance to
Our founders’ extraordinary exemplum with its prayerful protestations that all are created Compassionate and Equal.
Abandoned restaurant window overlooking Northern Mexico's border with USA