Pain
It arrives for your birthday, without any gift.
It has the face of a candle-flame,
little flickering incisors
chewing at the hem of a sleeve.
A guest, you have no choice but to serve it
boiled eggs for breakfast, pots of tea.
Afternoons spent sketching in the garden,
weeding the erratic zinnias.
Night is what you come to fear.
Pacing, muttering, unexplained thumps
as of books crashing to the floor
in the empty room beneath the stairs.
When the walls dissolve between dream
and waking there is nothing
to do but open the door and stride
barefoot into a utopia of freshly fallen snow.
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Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
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