Fuck the Inauguration

and a new poem about bugs and dinosaurs and you & me.

Sometimes something’s dead and alive and frozen and just just just getting going, all at the same time.

The inauguration is coming. Maybe you’ve heard? It’s going to be terrible. There is going to be so much damage done, so many people hurt. And - in some form or another - we will survive. There will be babies born and trees sprouting leaves and nameless heroes of communities who do the hard work of the day-to-day. There will be people who feel terrified and then, because of some small thing that we can’t exactly describe yet, done by someone who might or might not even know the significance of what they’re doing, those terrified people will feel such an overwhelming sense of support - of shared humanity - that they will be brought momentarily to tears and then they will stand up and step out their door to find someone who needs them too.

As a Taoist Marxist (a beautiful weirdly contradictory but intuitive balance that I’m still learning), this moment seems like one that demands us to trust in inevitability, as long as we are active in the making of the inevitable. As long as we’re not trying to do it all for the sake of getting it done, but just doing what we do, leading to the only place that it possibly could.

But I need to have guides. We all do. Sometimes I look to see what my people are talking about in the back of the bus before the sun comes up. Other times I have to look out at the world and get ideas from the bugs and the bunnies and the leaves. Bashō said to learn about the pine from the pine, but really you can probably learn about just about anything from the trees. This week, they gave me some ideas, and it turned into this poem.

A Paleontologist Digs Up Some Politics

I’m afraid I won’t know how to roll
out of bed on Monday to watch it
all happen, to see the start of it all.
I keep hearing the amber sap running over
us mosquitos, and our beating wings.
I keep seeing my sisters, desperate
and biting any last uncovered flesh,
storing up blood to nourish eggs
they’ll likely hold inside forever.
My brothers, large and ineffectual,
walking along the white walls,
waiting to be crushed by hands, wider
than the span of our lives, hands that think
of us as blood suckers, disease spreaders,
pests. I’m watching the world outside
my window turn blood-rust solid, and time
stopping, and the giant monsters trudging
to stupid inevitable extinction, and the leaves
falling, growing, blowing, celebrating
ten billion breaths of air, flying free, rolling
out of bed, unafraid of turning brown
and crumpling to the dirt, feeding children
they’ll never meet, who take shapes
unimaginable to us, immobilized, back here
at the mid-way point of mistakes, where
I heard someone assume that this is the start
and that there could ever be an end.

I hope that, in all the hullabaloo over the inauguration and the terrors that follow, I don’t fall into the trap of thinking that Trump was the beginning of the problem - that what we see in 2025 wasn’t always there and possible and yet transcendable. And even more importantly, I hope that I remember that there’s not really any such thing as an end, just a transformation that we’re participating in and nobody - nobody - can force to its conclusion.