Quote from A Future of Angels

 ===

Life is only a blip in a vast void.  But that blip is full and the void is empty.

                             --Naconda Who Dreamt

===

From my unpublished novel, A Future of Angels

"Collective stubbornness" as resistance

====

Nearly every dissident we interviewed — whether a student in the Democratic Republic of Congo who helped pressure an aspiring authoritarian leader into stepping down or a Venezuelan mother working to validate a true ballot count in a rigged election — told us that the key to fighting authoritarianism isn’t a single political strategy or protest march. It’s the willingness of individuals to engage in what the political scientist Maria J. Stephan calls “collective stubbornness”: people working together to increase the costs of authoritarian behavior, throwing enough sand in the gears of the state that its operations sputter and eventually fail.

Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer

====

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/16/opinion/resistance-activist-protest-trump.html

Poem: Moonless

 

Moonless

patient as the ribs

of Pluto,

birches crowd a dirt road,

 

the last sight

tired eyes can seek

unless

 

angels swoops down,

tearful as prophets

in the belly of blindness.

 

i sit cross-legged

in a snarl of dew,

whittling tinder

 

with a knife

which cannot be seen

in this forest of dim bones

 

and i peer

into the pitch dark

as if it were a sad mirror

 

i had swallowed.

 

 

 

=======================

Poem: In the Flow

 

In the Flow

 

dust feasts on the heat,

revels in a way which the bodies

that it came from could not.

 

it gloms fetal laurels

incused on a penny baked with corrosion

in the flow.

 

it rides gale-stoked carousels,

arcs of torn phantoms

vast as Ezekiel’s Wheel.

 

a dead ocean’s shark tooth

bites into an extinct spine

fractured in stone the same color as

 

beige pink red chocolate drama

has always been because no ice age

ever came here,

 

no glacial scour to mute

the howls of the dead

who rear in serpentine orgy,

 

lording over slithers

of dust and the snakes and

the lines of shifting ants

 

every once in a while.

 

 

====================================

6/13 .. worked title in better

6/12/26 mods all day ... depression making value judgements ... difficult

'in the flow' <--> 'in the ravine'

broken on the floor...

 

broken on the floor.

what are all these dots

in the parquetry, impossible

to see when standing tall

and pretending to be

something

able to have a conscience

which doesn’t rot from misuse

or drive me to lose

everything.

so i fall, down in a mess,

and suddenly now see

all the little cracks and cuts

which have glared for so long

from the underbelly

of the shine.

they lurk somewhere

in the alphabet of my heart,

these symbols

which never found shape,

desperate still, on the brink of

nothing, yet ripe with hope,

gazing up from the gone.

 

=======

Dream Quote

 

=====

 

“I don’t think anybody who is supporting the USA’s blatantly racist agenda believes in God or heaven.  If they did, they would be terrified of going to hell.”--  Angelica Fixtrous

 

=====

Random fiction-character stuff from when I am dreaming or half-asleep. ... It sounds pretty familiar, so if I have stolen someone's quote, I apologize.

Poem: Sucked

Sucked

 

the gully had lost its tongue of water,

could not sing from broken staves

with clefs of torn bark. 

long gone hooves of whipped horses

sweated the bed in haunted cacophony;

stabbed it with their dead stampedes.

even now a few tail-eating shoes

fretted like rusty knives.

 

the only liquid was a mousy dram

snagged in the night by a cloaking owl,

or fanged from a faceless rabbit.

heatwaves chewed

on what could not be sucked,

and the jumping cholla reached high,

sihouetted kin of a crucifix,

praising their golgotha.

 

shadows outflanked a coyote,

unrolled a slow sarcophagus

over a sprinkle of paralyzed lizards.

the one cloud looked down,

bulbous gavel of an absent judge;

or the rudder of a helmsman

absconded to the pub, unable to score,

a carouse more wisp than teat.

 

======================

6/10 ... took out a word

6/5/26 ... eds all day ...  

“Cylindropuntia fulgida … possesses many common names, though the most common one is "jumping cholla", which comes from the ease with which the stems detach from the main plant when brushed, "jumping" onto passing animals.”

"tail-eating"  = ouroboros = visual symbol for a horseshoe, symbol for desert, etc.

Poem: House Cat

 

House Cat

 

the pet on the couch

wears no clothes.

it walks under beds and could

through dark woods.

 

it never seeks money,

purrs in content and often

gets touched (compared

to my lack of hugs).

 

it doesn’t grasp war

or addictions or obsessions

or adulteries.

no ghosts seem to haunt it,

 

now anyways.

 

long ago, it was neutered,

its siblings perhaps discarded.

it fled the feral, meowed and

meowed at a random door

 

and stayed.

 

===============

Long ago, a cat showed up at our house (me and my wife, now ex-wife), meowed till we let it in.  It was young, already neutered.  Like so, Bello joined the household.   But, like most of my poems, this one isn't 'about' the literal subject so much as it is philosophical.

Poem: Marketplace

 

Marketplace

 

never but today,

a crossroads of tomb-shaped stalls

with poppies all over them,

floating in a shiny, colorful sky of

packages shaped like crazed genitals.

 

and the carts and drays which clop and  

bubble with gourds and greens

and cascades of apples and ginger and

onions and bananas and sassafras and

all manner of basted snake-oil sheens of

pricetags shimmery.

 

and the dulcimers blooming.

and the barkers extolling.

and the children as shrill and frantic

as oversized parakeets.

 

and the razzle-dazzle of the

fortunetellers and jesters,

show bears and prancers,

casuists and priests.

 

and the burros horselaughing.

and the long wet dog tongues

whiny near the knees of fishmongers

and butchers.  so many

 

barely hidden, spicy needs

under the saunter of chaps and

straps and juts of dresses and chests and

so much sexualized confidence

riding piggyback on a finagle of finances--

squadrons of flag-tongues aflutter,

battling it out with gusto amid a fray of

happenstance and haggle.

 

and the ripe underworld

of envy and secrets and hate so red in

eyeballs yet often coaxed forth by the alehouses.

and the smear of pig guts on aprons.

and the procession of fops and tramps and

wenches and lasses and urchins and middle classers

bolstered by a pale of police.

 

and the savory and yet also sewer scents.

and the gilt wheels relentless to roll and

crush the stiff rats of yesterday’s poison.

and the loud calling from the street corners

of prophets and gigsters and

criers and hawkers and officials

who decry and declare.  and

the lack of thought and sanity and

the insatiable greed whipping it all,

the merciless gait.

 

 

 

====================================

6/13/26 ... changed a word

6/3/26 removed a word

6/2/26 ... fixed typos .. changed a word

Quote from "This Is How to Defeat an Autocrat"

 ====

Hungary’s economy is a mess, but post-election polling by Median, an organization that had predicted election results with uncanny accuracy, shows that voters saw corruption as the most important issue by far. Asked why they thought Orban had lost, 49 percent cited corruption, and only 18 percent thought it was the “worsening economic situation, rising cost of living.” The next three reasons cited were “lies” (15 percent); “fearmongering, war rhetoric” (11 percent); and “people got fed up” (10 percent). In other words, Hungarians seemed to see the damage that Orbanism had done to the nation as more important than any harm they felt they had suffered as individuals. They were united by a sense of moral outrage — “value choices,” as one person close to the incoming government described it to me.

--M. Gessen,  This Is How to Defeat an Autocrat, https://www.nytimes.com/by/m-gessen

====