Nothing

The thing is, in my house tragedy is a daily affair. Nothing happened two days ago and nothing will continue to happen as the machine keeps growing. Tune in to the flames or breathe in prayers, breathe out nothing.

As though the Middle Passage and colonization ever fully ended. I surely don't believe in "revolution." All that'll bring you is more suffering, more Stalin and Castro. "Revolution" is Che Guevara on a T-shirt and the collectors item Swatch. "Left-leaning leaders" have the same to offer as W does, nothing.

"age after age, the uninstructing dead."
(Derek Walcott)

Florida is no more whack than California, both nothingness personified through a love of freeways, strip-malls and a wide variety of palm trees. I remember loving L.A. when I first saw it five years ago, its utter monstrous mass reminding me of the Miami I saw through airplane windows in 1982, concrete as far as you look. The same thrill of Mexico City's endless pavement, fuck it, let's cut down as many forests and temples as possible, put two more malls on the motherfucker. There's nothing to organize besides the notebook.

I read the blogs & magazines about the election and I feel pretty much nothing. Still underpaid, still in debt, same succession of days, same notebook joys. Same invisible brown skin.

Aaron Tieger's poems work wonderfully, gripping days into fine stanzas:

"Forget about the war
for a night. Stand around
shivering after drinks
getting things straight
just as I thought. What
does it mean when instinct
tells me instinct is wrong?"
(Days and Days, Pressed Wafer, 2004)

Write for the pleasure of silence magnified through a borrowed computer. For the clarity tragedy offers, for the swivel turn decades ago from fear to nothing.

"Distracted from all reality
Now I'm let off on a minor technicality"
(Cypress Hill)

Like Katha Pollitt, I'd like to simply "Mourn." Maybe now some Americans will understand what Venezuela feels like.