This is America.

Republican politicians cynically abandoned every American value, values we the people hold dear. You who voted for Donald Trump and other high-office Republicans: you are lost, only half a step behind your callous leaders, none of whom give a damn about you.

You voted into the highest office in the land a misogynist bigot and con man, an ignorant billionaire and narcissistic pig who spent his entire life crushing people just like you, without a second’s thought.

You excuse yourself for voting for this monster, for inflicting this hideous thing on our country. You tell yourself that it’s okay because you are mad at … at … you can’t legitimately articulate what you are mad at or why, can you? You excuse yourself, but you have fooled nobody—not even yourself. Somewhere inside, you know that you have done something terrible.

You make me sick.

Look at who you have become, what you have abandoned. Look at it, and remember, over the coming weeks and months and years. Your thoughtless action identifies you with Trump, the vile putridity that he stands for, that the Republicans stand for, and has put you as far from this, our America, as is humanly possible. Read this and be ashamed for what you have done, for what you chose, for what you have become. Because this is America, and you are no longer part of it:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

–Emma Lazarus, 1883

Windows wide,

birds chirping front and back,

Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony

fills the house.

Life could be worse.

Chit-chit-chet-chit-chet-chet

swish-swish-swish-chit-chit-swish…

intense feline scrutiny:

a murder of crows squabbles over bugs

beneath new snow, under old Ponderosa—

stymied.

vap’rous backlit wrack

flee

the cold turbulent flow

blear

that baleful winter’s orb

Primordial realm,
ice and cold —
we near the mists of Niflheim

Open the sliding glass door

to a wall of humidity.

Look!

The Scorpion—

its supergiant heart Antares

reaching further than Mars—

an unaccustomed ten degrees higher

in the evening sky.

Kalaeloa runway 22L

from seven thousand feet:

one end is heavier

in skid marks.

Cauliflower and gossamer,

red-tinged clouds—

we chase a bloody Sun.

I write

Into the void.

Transient, ephemeral, aperiodic,

Sharp.

Null hypothesis. By assumption

Not significant. You are

Alone. Free. Leap

Into the ether, the abyss —

Into the void.