Original Poem: Last Round
Reflections from a Weird, Warm Day in November
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
I'm deeply grateful to continue this collaboration with The Good Men Project, and I'm happy to have another cycle of poems forthcoming. This first one, inspired by an unusually warm day following an unusually awful day, is a meditation of sorts on politics, culpability, and the increasing impossibility of connection in a zero sum game sociocultural America. Other stuff too, including golf (gross). Heading into 2025 I shouldn’t, can’t, and won’t detach from political stuff, particularly as it relates to the least powerful amongst us, but I hope to contribute in ways that are more creative and less indignant, more empathetic and less baleful, more hopeful and less nihilistic. Let’s see how that goes ;)
Author’s note: this poem, as much as anything I’ve written during the last several years, epitomizes, in microcosm, the approach I’ve attempted to take(for, in no particular order, a way to stay focused, a way to stay sane, and mostly a way to channel all these feelings into something…if not substantial and meaningful, something that, for me, will endure more in a personal way than yet another political rant which, will those all serve a purpose, are—for better and often worse—fairly redundant, and outdated practically by the time they’re published; this, at least, reflects observations in ways—for better or worse!—only I could articulate them).
Last Round
What do I know?
Four white guys golfing,
the day after an election
that served last call for democracy.
It seems obvious, at least to me
at first glance, they are at peace
with themselves, with this world.
None of their hats are red, it’s true,
but I detect no disgruntlement,
and while charity begins at home
Fascism’s always partial to country clubs.
What do I know,
aloof in my car—not thinking
about the price of gas any more
or less than I usually do,
which is privilege
which means freedom
from worry, but also the choice
to embrace scapegoats and excuses
the way unruly toddlers are pacified
with treats close to bedtime.
What do I know?
How many 70-degree days do we get
in November: a mini miracle
courtesy of luck or climate change
or the heat of wildfires and burning
books, or else this unseasonal warmth
is the admonishment of sterner forces
because God disapproves of abortions,
all of us closer to what boils beneath us?
What do I know?
Maybe these men aren’t having fun
and this excursion is an emergency,
a hastily assembled show of solidarity
amongst friends and fathers in need
of airing concerns, speaking candidly
on behalf of wives, daughters, and colleagues,
to ponder why the tree of liberty wants more
blood so it can grow big enough to block
out the sun, and how a handful of billionaires
drove electric cars through a needle’s eye,
proving that even Heaven can be outsmarted
or at least outsourced with enough cheap labor.
What do I know?
Perhaps this mid-afternoon round
is simply a healthy and welcome reprieve
from social media, cynicism, and smiles
from the bleach-toothed toadies
who tell us who won each news cycle
according to scripts written by CEOs.
Who am I to judge?
As if my own eyes haven’t been blinded
squinting at bright screens instead of sleeping,
when I should be doing less stressful things
like counting sheep or sweating out
existential dread the old-fashioned way?
What do I know?
Digesting content that is curated
for me by algorithms I don’t understand
learning that many people enjoy watching
insects forced to fight in small spaces—
no discussion, no negotiation, no quarter—
the one that wins eating what it kills:
this unsavory precision of evolution
burdened by neither fear nor imagination,
they move forward, forever in the moment,
exactly as the world has made them.
What do I know?
Maybe these men are blissful
and oblivious (or at least indifferent
to the ways we scorch the landscape,
our instinct for survival a trial of errors),
grateful in some unspoken way
for the certainty of the sky,
watching its spectacle of light
and savoring each second like squirrels
storing whatever sustenance they can,
as the darkness of a colder season sets in.
*More poems from my wonderful engagement with The Good Men Project here.