falling in no particular direction writhing trapped by a vast nothingness a dislocation, an abandonment a moment of being an airport person and only an airport person up in the air literally and figuratively
the Moon has its own gravity disembarking with a silent mooncrash the procedure and verification the green pass proceed to Starbucks to Uber to the torment nexus to the thing the scientists all said should never be built yet was built regardless, lest the Chinese leverage its absence to create a geopolitical vulnerability (my friend the questionably sentient model weight matrix) to a place where I found myself as a transsexual beat poet indescribable and incomprehensible before the lifting of a logistical veil but all the fundamentals were there, somehow
“Welcome to the U.S.A”, she told me as she handed me my drivers license a sacred document in a country of migrationary labor where 18 wheelers are a fact, and environmentalism a declaration on a number plate
a country paralyzed by xenophobia a country beholden to excess a country where cars are partisan a country that casually dispenses mass death yet ties itself in knots over the finer nuances of progressivism a country ignorant of Europe’s rootedness and aristocratic humanity yet oversteps their contempt for human aspiration and longing, painful longing to break free of one’s ascribed station
a country where yellow buses the size of Soviet submarines flock in herds dedicated to the principle of absolute racial equality before the law one per child, if necessary the resource cost is negotiable, the principle is not a principle that would elsewhere be subject to compromise to disintegration to a regulation and rationing the yellow school bus is a sacred artefact handed down from a legacy of Civil War veterans who knew what they wrought who choked on their own blood who watched their comrades succumb to wounds and disease to rip out the curse of slavery and create a land where the magic yellow schoolbus can take us to the stars to MTV to some really excellent music and truly lovely ways of living I thank them
the president is laundered trying to rule by executive fiat and never left the eighties oh, America how you grew up
a country where the flag has been reduced to an empty abstraction adorning tshirts and the tailfins of warplanes yet refuses to surrender its Old Glory and horizontal expansion its collection of shimmering stars of hope
a country that gave so many gifts to the world and so many mistakes a country of final refuge of nothing else will do a finality a country I wish would come back down to Earth and remember the hardship endured where slave, settler and indigene trod in search of what they call “a better life” in the newspapers trying their best to acknowledge that the hands toil and the heart yearns near and far to find opportunity in a place called America
in my self-justification my thoughts drift back to the one I knew who left “one in, one out” say the British tabloids I am glad I don’t live there anymore.