Life on Earth
This poem is not about the election, but it does accurately represent the way I feel about it.
I wrote this poem in 2018. I’ve read it a few times in public, including at a poetry event at the Langston Hughes House in Harlem, but this is the first time I’m sharing it online.
“A second man pleaded guilty on Thursday to arranging the transport of dozens of immigrants across Texas last year that ended with 10 of them dead or dying in a sweltering tractor-trailer in a San Antonio parking lot.” —Reuters, March 8, 2018
hell is other people a swelter of two hundred or more packed like Christmas trees in this black, rumbling oven could be a thousand bodies, degrees take your pick jostling molecules struggle to cohere in this boiling plasma we cluster like penitents at the bullet holes in the siding each in turn placing lips to stigmata mouthing our paeans to the great god Oxygen not prayers for freedom or new lives but prayers for mere survival for life meanwhile the captain’s bony hand touches shoulder after shoulder choosing sides for a team no one wants to join Team No One you there on the outside watching this truck rock on its springs don’t you come a-knockin’ don’t you know you’re in here too don’t you realize the phone call is coming from inside the house don’t you understand i’m not afraid to die i’m only afraid of hell and we already live there ∅
Spot on, and reminds me of Voltaire’s saying that those who believe absurdities are capable of committing atrocities.
Team No One: I like it for many reasons. It may be the only team I ever join, I who have rejected fandom for 99% of my days. I virtually do not join. A team you don’t join sounds like heaven.
A friend expressed the election this way: There aren’t enough rich people in the USA to elect anyone. A lot of poor people voted for him. Why? They think that by joining the Trump team, they will be like the rich and famous, that some of the money and glamour and glory will rub off on them, uniting them with the people they’re fans of. Of course the poor support tax cuts for the rich, because the magical thinking is that it will them rich, too. And successful. And famous. And friended.
Team No One has to figure this out.
Team No One can fight asymetrical warfare, something the losing team did not do very well. We saw how bad “the politics of joy” was in the Humphrey-Muskey campaign, and it would appear this campaign repeated it with the same, losing result. A rout.
Also, as a midwesterner, I noted with cringes every time Colbert or someone on MSNBC made a joke about how strange and obtuse midwesterners “are.” How funny Tim Waltz "is.” How quaint. This is my own candidate’s team going on about how insular and coastal they are. Until the losing party takes my people seriously, as in not-a-joke, will they begin to find policies and maybe more importantly a style that will get them what they want. Sure, I laugh at Colbert’s jokes at the expense of midcontinent-ers, but inside I know he’s a fool for thinking there’s nothing there but corn shucks.